in The Handbook of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer & Barry Smart, London: Sage, 2001: 353-67 (from: http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~robertvk/papers/ritzer.htm)

Norbert Elias and Process Sociology

Robert van Krieken

INTRODUCTION
Norbert Elias has only recently begun to be recognized as a major sociologist. He had an underground reputation in the 1950s among those of his English colleagues who could see the potential in his ideas, and a scattering of scholars in Europe who had managed to obtain a copy of his major work, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. In the 1960s, word gradually spread about the importance of his approach to sociology and history: first in the Netherlands and Germany, then in France where his work began to be translated in the 1970s, and in the English-speaking world since the translation of his work into English began to accelerate in the 1980s.

His reluctance to engage in the more fashionable trends in sociology has been both a source of appeal for those looking for something 'new' in sociology and a barrier to a balanced assessment of his ideas. Commentators tend to veer between two diametrically opposed poles, between uncritical acceptance or ungenerous rejection, so that debates on Elias's work frequently take on the character of theological disputes between supposedly admiring 'followers' and critics. To appreciate Elias most productively we need to steer a path between these two poles, towards a critical but well-founded understanding of his contribution to contemporary sociology.

Elias offers a particular paradigm for sociological thought which opposes both the structural-functionalist and methodological-individualist tendencies in sociology in a very different way from either Marxist and neo-Marxist critics, or poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists. He developed a unique set of concepts for analysing social life which he hoped could cut through many of the central dilemmas in sociology, especially the apparent oppositions between action and structure, individual and society.

The substantive issues Elias dealt with - the history of emotions, attitudes towards the body, sexuality, socialisation, and so on - anticipated later historical and sociological scholarship, often providing a more systematic and effective approach to the same problems. His analysis of the historical development of emotions and psychological life is particularly important in relation to the connections he established with larger-scale processes such as state formation, urbanisation and economic development.

We can identify five interconnected principles underlying Elias's approach to sociology. First, although societies are composed of human beings who engage in intentional action, the outcome of the combination of human actions is most often unplanned and unintended. The task for sociologists is, then, to analyse and explain the mechanics of this transformation of intentional human action into unintended patterns of social life, which necessarily takes place over longer or shorter periods of time.

Second, human individuals can only be understood in their interdependencies with each other, as part of networks of social relations, or what he often referred to as 'figurations'. Rather than seeing individuals as possessing an 'autonomous' identity with which they then interact with each other and relate to something we call a 'society', Elias argued that we are social to our very core, and only exist in and through our relations with others, developing a socially-constructed 'habitus' or 'second-nature'. An important subsidiary principle is that the study of processes of social development and transformation - what Elias called sociogenesis - is necessarily linked to the analysis of psychogenesis - processes of psychological development and transformation, the changes in personality structures or habitus which accompany and underlie social changes.

Third, human social life should be understood in terms of relations rather than states. For example, instead of power being a 'thing' which persons, groups or institutions possess to a greater or lesser degree, Elias argued we should think in terms of power relations, with ever-changing 'balances' or 'ratios' of power between individuals and social units.

Fourth, human societies can only be understood as consisting of long-term processes of development and change, rather than as timeless states or conditions. He spoke in this regard of the 'retreat of sociologists into the present'. Elias's sociology is above all a historical sociology, although he himself rejected the term, largely because he argued it should be assumed that sociology is undertaken historically. His point was more that sociologists cannot logically avoid concerning themselves with the diachrony of long-term social processes in order to understand current social relations and structures.

Fifth, sociological thought moves constantly between a position of social and emotional involvement in the topics of study, and one of detachment from them. In contrast to natural science, the fact that sociologists study other interdependent human beings means that they are part of their object of scientific study, and thus cannot avoid a measure of involvement in their own research and theorizing. Social-scientific knowledge develops within the society it is part of, and not independently of it. At the same time, this involvement is often a barrier to an adequate understanding of social life, especially one which can resolve or transcend any of the persistent problems characterizing human beings' relationships with each other. The most obvious problem Elias was concerned with was violence. He felt it was important for social scientists to try to transcend the emotion-laden, everyday conceptualization of the human world and develop a 'way of seeing' that went beyond current ideologies and mythologies. Indeed, he often referred to sociologists as engaged in the 'destruction of myths'.

None of these points are entirely unique to Elias, and they can all be found in the work of other sociologists. However, what makes his approach so powerful is the combination or synthesis of what is currently spread across a variety of sociological perspectives - structuralism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, historical sociology, theories of the state and state formation. A number of commentators have spoken of the fragmentation of sociology as a discipline. What Elias offers is not a 'solution' to that problem, but a set of sensitizing concepts, an orientation to how one thinks about and practises sociology with the potential to draw many of the various threads of sociological thought together.

All of these principles and lines of argument in Elias's work interlink with each other, so that it is difficult to grasp adequately any single one or subset of them without attending to their interrelationships with the others. In other words, in interpreting Elias's work it is important to refer to the relations between all the various strands, rather than taking any one of them in isolation. The aim of this essay is to provide a basic sketch of Elias's sociological perspective and his approach to sociological research, as well as to locate and position his ideas within broader sociological debates.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Born on 22 June, 1897 in the then-German town of Breslau (now Wracow in Poland), Norbert was the only child of Hermann and Sophie Elias, a relatively well-off, middle-class and Jewish couple. At school his studies included reading Immanuel Kant, as well as the classics of German literature: Schiller, Goethe and Heine. Elias began his university studies in 1918, aged 21, at the University of Breslau. His major subjects were medicine and philosophy, with some of his philosophy semesters undertaken in Freiburg and Heidelberg, under Heinrich Rickert, Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl. His philosophy teacher was the neo-Kantian Richard Hönigswald, who later to became his doctoral supervisor. This period of study began immediately after Elias's return from the war, where he had served with a communications unit, at first in Poland and then on the Western front.

Elias developed a profoundly critical attitude towards what he felt was the philosophical understanding of individual human beings, an understanding that, he argued, has continued to exert a powerful influence on sociological thought. Later he wrote:

The conception of the individual as homo clausus, a little world in himself who ultimately exists quite independently of the great world outside, determines the image of man in general. Every other human being is likewise seen as a homo clausus; his core, his being, his true self appears likewise as something divided within him by an invisible wall from everything outside, including every other human being.⁽¹⁾

All his life Elias continued to argue against this conception of individuality and human identity, which he felt persisted in the structure of most sociological thought, despite the explicit acceptance of the apparently obvious argument that individual identity is socially constructed. We do not know if he read this passage in Marx, but Elias's position was essentially that of Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach: '...the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations'.⁽²⁾

However, Elias had a serious falling-out with Hönigswald about aspects of his argument in the thesis, which resulted in Elias removing the offending passages so that Hönigswald would agree to allow the thesis to be submitted. The nature of the dispute is not entirely clear and the subject of intense debate,⁽³⁾but in any event, the effect was that Elias had been cut off from any future career in philosophy, with no prospect of further support from Hönigswald as a supervisor of the German 'second doctorate', the Habilitationsschrift, required to obtain a permanent university post. While Elias was in Heidelberg, Jaspers had spoken to him about Max Weber, and his experiences in the war and the factory had evoked a desire 'to get closer to a field of study connected to real life experience',⁽⁴⁾ so a turn to sociology seemed the obvious step. He had sold some short stories to a newspaper, and anticipated he would be able to support himself as a journalist.

At the age of 27 he moved to Heidelberg, hoping that Max Weber's brother, Alfred Weber, would take him on for his Habilitation. Weber agreed in principle to supervise his thesis on the origins of the natural sciences in Florentine society, but Elias had to wait his turn, around four to five years. Another sociologist, the 23-year-old Talcott Parsons, was also drawn to Heidelberg at the same time, starting his PhD, although the two young men appear not to have met. Like many of their contemporaries, both understood that Heidelberg was close to being the very best place for a sociologist to work and study, attracting them with its powerful intellectual climate, based on a gathering of formidable intellects engaged in a lively and productive development of sociological thought.

He met and became friends with Karl Mannheim, who was four years older and a step ahead of Elias in the hierarchy, occupying the position of an unpaid lecturer. Elias assisted Mannheim in his teaching, unofficially and unpaid. Heidelberg was a lively centre of the best in German sociology, Max Weber's influence was strong, and Elias 'spent a great of time reading Marx',⁽⁵⁾ as well as Tönnies, Sombart, Troeltsch and Simmel.

When Mannheim was offered a chair in Frankfurt after the publication of Ideology and Utopia in 1929, Mannheim agreed to supervise Elias immediately if he agreed to work as his assistant for three years. This was far more attractive than a four to five year wait with Weber, so in 1930 Elias moved to Frankfurt and a different set of intellectual influences.

Between 1930 and 1933 Elias worked as Mannheim's assistant, working in the same building as the Institut für Sozialforschung, the home of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse, although there seems to have been little contact with the sociologists. Indeed, there was animosity between Mannheim and the Institut group, so Elias's association with Mannheim was an obstacle to such contact, although he seems have been on good terms with Adorno. Mannheim only gave lectures, and Elias was responsible for the more direct contact with students, taking seminars and supervising dissertations.

Two of the Frankfurt students were Gisèle Freund and Ilse Seglow. Freund was an amateur photographer, so Elias encouraged her to pursue a dissertation on photography, and the two became friends. Freund took her thesis to the Sorbonne in 1933 and completed it in 1936. Similarly, he encouraged Ilse Seglow, who had worked as an actress, to make the theatre and the 'actor's society' the topic of her thesis. Seglow noted that she and other students regarded Elias as an excellent teacher, as well as commenting on his self-assurance: 'He seemed quite sure of what he wanted to do - too sure for some people's liking'.⁽⁶⁾

Elias was now part of a group of powerful intellects. Mannheim himself was a key figure, bringing with him from his contact with Georgy Lukács in Budapest all of the ideas of the 'cultural' turn in Western Marxism. Another vital element of the move from Heidelberg to Frankfurt was that recent psychological theory was taken far more seriously, and later he said that 'probably Freud's ideas had a greater influence on my thinking than those of any theoretical sociologist'.⁽⁷⁾

Die Höfische Mensch was completed early in 1933, but it was no longer of any practical consequence for Elias. The National Socialists were busy clearing out the left intellectuals from the universities, so Mannheim left for the London School of Economics and Political Science at Harold Laski's invitation. Elias stayed a little longer, until about March or April, A close friend drove him to a number of cities in Switzerland - Basel, Zurich and Berne - looking for an academic post, without success. He returned to Breslau briefly to see his parents, and then moved on to Paris, again in pursuit of a university position.

He lived in Paris during the rest of 1933 and 1934, but failing to get any academic position. Although Elias's French was good, it was not up to the level of fluency required for academic life, and being Jewish as well as a foreigner would have been an almost insurmountable barrier. A friend from the Breslau and Heidelberg days, Alfred Glucksman encouraged Elias, knowing little English, to move to London in 1935, although given his precarious financial situation he needed little persuasion.

For the next three years he worked exclusively on his next book project, which he hoped would enable him to obtain a position in England. Both the Paris years and this period appear generally to have been quite happy for Elias. In Paris, although he was living from one day to the next, he otherwise free of encumbrances. Once he was in London and had access to the library of the British Museum, he 'felt completely at home', more than content to spend every day reading, ordering books, taking notes, and writing.

Elias wrote that the 'more general problem' which he was addressing 'has also been posed for a long time by American sociology',⁽⁸⁾ mentioning William Sumner's Folkways.⁽⁹⁾ He cited Sumner's remarks about the necessity of examining exactly what any given culture's morals, norms and values were and how they arose, adding that it was also important to apply the analysis to 'our own society and its history'. Elias had come across the notion of the 'unintended consequences of human action' before, in Hegel's 'cunning of reason', and in Marx, both of whom had read Adam Smith. But it was Sumner's Folkways which seems to have provided the most thought-through linkage of Elias's concerns with culture and behaviour with the concept's original formulation in Adam Ferguson and the other Scottish Enlightenment theorists. Sumner wrote:

From recurrent needs arise habits for the individual and customs for the group, but these results are consequences which were never conscious, and never foreseen or intended....Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental development must be reached, before they can be used as a basis from which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future, problems whose pressure can be foreseen. The folkways, therefore, are not creations of human purpose and wit...all the life of human beings, in all ages and stages of culture, is primarily controlled by a vast mass of folkways handed down from the earliest existence of the race, only the topmost layers of which are subject to change and control, and have been somewhat modified by human philosophy, ethics, and religion, or by other acts of intelligent reflection.⁽¹⁰⁾

'Folkways' was a different way of talking about 'civilization', and Sumner's ideas on their unplanned nature and historicity at least resonated with Elias's ideas if they did not help generate them. They reinforced Elias's critique of the notion of 'sovereign' power, and his conception of the unplanned nature of historical change.

Sumner could only contrast 'civilized' to 'primitive' folkways, but there was a more precise historical understanding of forms of behaviour and social interaction in Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages, which provided Elias with a detailed picture of everyday life in the Middle Ages which he could contrast with the contemporary world. As Johan Goudsblom has pointed out, the brevity of Elias's references to Huizinga mask the significance of his influence. Huizinga drew his attention to the writings of Erasmus as well as the type of historical material which would be used to demonstrate the historical character of human psychology, and sensitized him to the significance of manners and etiquette as expressions of both people's psychic lives and the structure of their social relations.⁽¹¹⁾ The opening chapter of The Waning of the Middle Ages was titled 'The violent tenor of life',⁽¹²⁾ and Huizinga wrote of Europe five centuries earlier:

The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual...All things presented themselves to the mind in violent contrasts and impressive forms, lent a tone of excitement and of passion to everyday life and tended to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness which characterize life in the Middle Ages.⁽¹³⁾

Huizinga's picture of medieval life, especially its ferocity, insecurity and emotionality made a powerful impression on Elias, and a very similar understanding of the contrast between medieval and modern social life runs through the whole of The Civilizing Process. Indeed, Elias's work is best understood when it is read alongside Huizinga's book.

In a letter to Goudsblom he once suggested he had only a slight familiarity with sociological literature at this time. He wrote:

...my ability to write Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation was to some extent due to the fact that my knowledge of the books which are now declared the standard books of a sociologists' ancestors was at the time of writing this book extremely deficient'.⁽¹⁴⁾

He often criticised philosophers for creating the impression that science 'springs from the head of man fully antecedent and fully armed like Athene from the head of Zeus',⁽¹⁵⁾ but he displayed precisely this tendency in his concern to avoid discussion of his own antecedents and sources of inspiration. Indeed, his self-assessment suggests that to a large extent he actively sought the position of a sociological maverick, an outsider. As an account of his intellectual background it is wholly inaccurate, as he himself said later in his autobiographical notes, commenting that he never saw himself 'as marking a beginning, an innovator starting from nothing. I was highly conscious of myself as a man of my generations'.⁽¹⁶⁾ In the Heidelberg and Frankfurt days he had absorbed almost all of the best in German sociology, if not by reading Marx, Weber, Simmel, Troeltsch and Tönnies, then in discussion with a group of sophisticated intellectuals who had. In Paris he probably gained at least an impression of Durkheimian sociology in discussions with Celestin Bouglé. In London, this body of ideas was to join forces with those of Ginsberg and American sociologists such as Sumner, Ogburn, and, indirectly, Small, Cooley and Mead, as well as the intellectual traditions - particularly the Scottish Enlightenment theorists - they drew upon. In general we can say that Elias was well-acquainted, either directly or indirectly, with, if not the entire field of European, English and American sociological thought, then certainly the most important ideas that sociologists had produced up to the 1930s, as well as with Freud and the Gestalt psychologists.⁽¹⁷⁾

Armed, then, with a sophisticated conceptual apparatus, Elias set to work on his book. Every day he would go the British Museum Library, ordering books whenever footnotes attracted his attention, initially with the intention of writing about French liberalism. However, he stumbled across a variety of editions of books on etiquette, which resonated with the work he had already done on social interaction in French court society. They provided powerful empirical illustration of Freud's comment on the historical nature of human character, a theme which Karl Mannheim was also interested in. Later Elias said that he saw his work on Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation as a critique of the bulk of academic psychology, where it was assumed that one could only analyse human psychology in terms of real human beings who could be measured or assessed in a direct way,⁽¹⁸⁾ whereas he was undertaking a historical analysis of the development of human personality structure.

The first volume was completed around late 1936 and the second at the end of 1938. There was a dark side to this extremely productive period in Elias's life, however. His parents visited him in 1938, and he did his best to persuade them to stay in England, but such a move was too dramatic for an elderly couple, and they returned to Breslau, convinced that no harm would come to them because they had done no wrong. In 1940, he heard from Sophie that his father had died, not long after having exerted all his efforts to publish Elias's book, and Sophie herself disappeared shortly after to Auschwitz, where she died, Elias assumed in 1941. The 44-year-old Elias was understandably badly affected by this; he said later that he felt guilty for failing to persuade them to stay in London, and the image of his mother in a concentration camp haunted him. 'I still remember very clearly....Of course, I shall never get over it. I'll never get over it'.⁽¹⁹⁾

The next decade was a bleak period. He wrote an article for the first volume of the British Journal of Sociology titled 'Studies in the genesis of the naval profession', which drew upon a point made in Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation about the relationship between navies and armies. Elias co-founded a Group Analysis society with Foulkes⁽²⁰⁾ and others, and went into psychoanalysis himself. His luck turned in 1954 when, at the age of 57, he was offered lectureships by Ilya Neustadt at Leicester and Eugene Grebenick at Leeds, choosing Leicester because of its closer proximity to London.

Leicester was then a very small institution, a college affiliated to the University of London, but sociology was to grow significantly in England during the 1950s and 1960s, and the Leicester department played a central role in the formation of English sociology. Between 1954 and 1957 Elias and Neustadt were on their own, teaching the sociology program as part of the University of London Economics degree taught externally at Leicester. By the mid-1960s, as Richard Brown recollects, Neustadt and Elias were in charge of 'probably the largest honours school in sociology in the country with some sixty students graduating each year'.⁽²¹⁾ Elias had particular responsibility for the first-year course, and a number of now-prominent English intellectuals either studied at Leicester or worked alongside Elias. Martin Albrow recalls finding himself, together with Giddens and Hopkins, at the back of Elias's Introduction to Sociology lectures, 'not altogether willingly, constrained by his insistence (rightly) that new lecturers in their mid-twenties had an awful lot to learn'.⁽²²⁾

The lectures included a rich variety of material on social conditions throughout the world, based on United Nations figures, giving students both a comparative perspective on world society and a historical sense of the developments in social conditions over longer periods of time. In his writing he returned to one of the interests of his younger days, the sociology of knowledge, publishing 'Problems of involvement and detachment' in the British Journal of Sociology in 1956. The more central conceptual concerns of Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation only began to re-emerge gradually in his contribution to the reworking of a thesis by John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, published in 1965.

The dominant ethos in sociology, since the 1950s at least, has been to develop one's sociological position through a debate with key early and contemporary sociologists and philosophers, whereas Elias regarded the discussion of other writers largely as a distraction, usually relegating comments on his sources and related research to his footnotes. He thought and wrote as many of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars - Weber, Simmel, Mannheim, Freud - did, minimising his engagement with other thinkers and focusing on a direct engagement with his topic. His theoretical talents lay in absorbing the essence of what was useful and productive in writers he read, integrating their insights with other ideas and utilizing the resultant synthesis of concepts in the analysis of a specific body of evidence. However, this ran so strongly counter to the disciplinary orientation of sociologists in the post-war decades that, as he put it, 'Whenever I brought out an unusual idea in one of my annual lectures for my colleagues, it resulted in a very hostile argument with the younger generation'.⁽²³⁾ His English colleagues treated him with 'a lightly condescending affection',⁽²⁴⁾ but only occasionally with intellectual respect.

When he retired at the age of 65, the offer of a chair turned up in Ghana, so, ever interested in adventure, he left England for Africa in 1962. In the two years he spent there he did some fieldwork with his students, but it has never been written up. In 1964 he returned to Leicester, and from this point onwards he returned to his pre-war levels of productivity. He began to cooperate with Eric Dunning in writings on the sociology of sport and Dunning and Elias agreed that sport was an important example of the regulation and management of emotions, playing a significant role in everyday life in modern societies. In 1969 Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation was re-published in German, along with Die Höfische Gesellschaft with a new introduction. His article on 'Sociology and psychiatry'⁽²⁵⁾ picked up his interest in the sociological understanding of psychology and individual experience. Was ist Soziologie? appeared in 1970, outlining in a more formal, textbook-style way Elias's sociological approach. In 1973 Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation was translated into French and began selling well. In Germany, students discovered the 1969 re-issue of Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, and read it alongside Foucault's book Discipline and Punish as an account of the increasingly disciplined character of modern social life.

Elias's intellectual reputation was growing slowly in Germany, the Netherlands and France. In 1977 he was awarded the Theodor Adorno prize by the city of Frankfurt, and the University of Frankfurt made him an emeritus Professor. The first volume of Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation was translated into English in 1978, published by a German/American publisher, and the second in 1982. This separation in the publication dates was to be a source of constant confusion in the English-language interpretations of The Civilizing Process, with reviewers often responding primarily to the first volume without taking into account the arguments in the second.

In the Netherlands he was developing a following among Dutch sociologists and historians, centred on the University of Amsterdam. In 1970, for example, Nico Wilterdink wrote, under an alias, a satirical piece for the student newspaper on the almost religious atmosphere of admiration and awe which had come to surround Elias:

In the Sociology Institute and the History Seminar, little else is talked about apart from Elias, Elias and Elias. That is quite understandable, because Elias is a godsend. He is a godsend for disillusioned social scientists who have lost their faith in American social science, but not their faith in the social sciences as such, and who shudder at Marxist or Marcusian hocus-pocus. And now there is finally someone who not only proclaims with great vigour what they actually long thought, but who also manages to fill the vacuum of doubt and scepticism with something entirely new.⁽²⁶⁾

There was also considerable criticism, but in the long run this heightened the interest in Elias and made it even more interesting and important to read him.

Between 1978 and 1984 he lived and worked at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) in Bielefeld, extremely productive despite failing eyesight. He worked with the help of a number of assistants, usually postgraduate sociology students, gave frequent guest lectures as well as numerous radio and television interviews, and in 1980 the University of Bielefeld awarded him an honorary doctorate.

The increasing attention being paid to Elias's work, both admiring and critical, brought with it new influences on the formation and, perhaps more importantly, the re-formation of his ideas. Commentators often stress the continuity of Elias's thinking, but it is equally important to be aware of how his ideas developed in response to criticism, discussion and current debates. When his arguments were described in terms he felt were too simplistic or inaccurate, he was moved to formulate the relevant ideas differently. When critics attacked, for instance, his argument about the increasingly balanced management of violence with the obvious example of the Holocaust, it provided an added impetus towards analysing the twentieth century development of German society. This line of thought also led him to change his position on the overall direction of civilizing processes, placing greater emphasis on the possibility of 'decivilizing processes', and to explore in more detail the specific, distinctive developments of society, culture and habitus in particular countries. He was also sensitive to the overall political context of world society in the 1970s and 80s, placing greater emphasis on the potential for violence between states than he had in his earlier work, where there was more of a focus on interpersonal violence and its transformations.

From 1985 onwards he remained in Amsterdam, writing his books on Time, The Symbol Theory and his autobiography. In 1985 he was invited by Pierre Bourdieu, who had been impressed by his work on the sociology of sport in the 1970s, to give lectures at the Collège de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. The ethnologist Hans-Peter Duerr also began writing his multi-volume critique of Elias's work, The Myth of the Civilizing Process,⁽²⁷⁾ to which Elias responded in 1988, along with a variety of other commentators. Shortly after a fall produced a lung infection, and he died in his chair on a hot afternoon on 1 August 1990.

CIVILIZING AND DECIVILIZING PROCESSES
The genesis and development of the modern, bourgeois, Western world is a problem which every major sociologist has addressed in one way or another. This is primarily because a grasp of its 'rules of formation' and its 'laws of movement' both helps us better understand the operation of the social world we live in, and also offers the possibility, at least, of gaining some sense of its potential future direction. Elias's approach to the origins of contemporary Western societies was rooted in dual synthesis of Freud with Marx on the one hand, and with Weber on the other. He drew on Marx's materialism to explain the development of a particular personality structure, emphasising its 'production' by particular sets of social relations, and elaborated on Freud's understanding of the effects of developing civilisation on psychic life in terms of Weber's conception of the state as organised around a monopoly of the means of violence. Elias's historicisation of human psychology provides empirical support for an understanding of the processes by which changes in social relations are interwoven with changes in psychic structure.

Processes of Civilization
'Civilization' is a concept we normally use with some caution, especially in social science, partly because we longer wish to admit explicitly to the opposition with 'barbarism'. It is far more common to speak of 'modern', 'Western', 'industrial', or 'capitalist' societies. Nonetheless, it is conceivable that the members of every culture see themselves as more 'civilized' than some others, and that the very basis of any culture's group identity is the opposition between all the positive virtues of its 'civilization' and the 'barbarism' of other, lesser cultures. The long-running tension between Christianity and Islam is only one example among many. What Elias felt sure was the product of a long historical process had, by the end of the eighteenth century, come to be defined by Europeans 'simply as an expression of their own high gifts'.⁽²⁸⁾ It became a crucial part of Europeans' sense of superiority over all other peoples in the world: 'the consciousness of their own superiority, the consciousness of this "civilization," from now on serves at least those nations which have become colonial conquerors, and therefore a kind of upper class to large sections of the non-European world, as a justification of their rule'.⁽²⁹⁾ It was Europeans' perception of themselves as particularly 'civilized', at the very hour of their indulgence in a horrific barbarism, that Elias organized his observations about the development of modern social life around, because he felt it went to heart of the constitution of the psychic structure characteristic of contemporary European societies.

Elias had a dual concern in The Civilizing Process: first, to demonstrate that 'we can never understand the relation between the social process and the 'psychical' as long as we see in the psychical only something static and unchangeable, as long as we do not also see the psychical as 'in process''⁽³⁰⁾ and, second, 'to investigate, step by step, which social processes are the motors of this psychical change'.⁽³¹⁾ He suggested that what we experience as 'civilization' is founded on a particular habitus, a particular psychic structure which has changed over time, and which can only be understood in connection with changes in the forms taken by broader social relationships. Referring to Morris Ginsberg's discussion of the 'plasticity' of human nature, Elias insisted that 'the molding of instinctual life, including its compulsive features, is a function of social interdependencies that persist throughout life', and these interdependencies change as the structure of society changes. 'To the variation in this structure correspond, 'wrote Elias, 'the differences in personality structure that can be observed in history'.⁽³²⁾ The first point was explored by Elias in relation to the successive editions of a variety of etiquette manuals, beginning with Erasmus' (1530) tract De civilitate morum puerilium (On civility in children), and the second in relation to the history of state formation in Britain, France and Germany, particularly the gradual monopolisation of the means of violence by the state.

The first volume of The Civilizing Process identifies gradual changes in expectations of people's interpersonal conduct in European societies, as well as the way they approached their own bodily functions and emotions. Elias began his story in the middle ages, not because he felt it marked any particular origin or 'as has sometime been asserted, the stage of "barbarism" or "primitiveness"',⁽³³⁾ but largely in order to have a story to tell, saying that 'the medieval standard must suffice as a starting point, without itself being closely examined, so that the movement, the developmental curve joining it to the modern age may be identified'.⁽³⁴⁾ In outlining 'correct' behaviour, Erasmus' book indicated 'attitudes that we have lost, that some among us would perhaps call "barbaric" or "uncivilized",' and it spoke 'of many things that have in the meantime become unspeakable, and of many others that are now taken for granted'.⁽³⁵⁾ Following Huizinga's⁽³⁶⁾ account, Elias suggested that typical medieval conduct was characterized by 'its simplicity, its naïvete,' emotions were 'expressed more violently and directly' and there were 'fewer psychological nuances and complexities in the general stock of ideas'.⁽³⁷⁾

Elias found that as time went on the standards applied to violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, eating habits, table manners and forms of speech became gradually more sophisticated, with an increasing threshold of shame, embarrassment and repugnance. In medieval society,

Compared to later eras, social control is mild. Manners, measured against later ones, are relaxed in all senses of the word. One ought not to snort or smack one's lips while eating. One ought not to spit across the table or blow one's nose on the tablecloth (for this is used for wiping greasy fingers) or into the fingers (with which one holds the common dish). Eating from the same dish or plate as others is taken for granted. One must only refrain from falling on the dish like a pig, and from dipping bitten food into the communal sauce.⁽³⁸⁾

Gradually more and more aspects of human behaviour become regarded as 'distasteful', and 'the distasteful is removed behind the scenes of social life'.

Again and again, wrote Elias, we see 'how characteristic is this movement of segregation, this hiding 'behind the scenes' of what has become distasteful'.⁽³⁹⁾ For example, a French etiquette manual from 1729 advises its readers as follows:

It is very impolite to keep poking your finger into your nostrils, and still more insupportable to put what you have pulled from your nose into your mouth....

You should avoid making a noise when blowing your nose...Before blowing it, it is impolite to spend a long time taking out your handkerchief. It shows a lack of respect toward the people you are with to unfold it in different places to see where you are to use it. You should take your handkerchief from your pocket and use it quickly in such a way that you are scarcely noticed by others.

After blowing your nose you should take care not to look into your handkerchief. It is correct to fold it immediately and replace it in your pocket.⁽⁴⁰⁾

One of the indications of the fact that some process of 'civilization' has taken place is, Elias felt, our feelings of unease when hearing of the behaviour which Erasmus described, and our sense of what is 'barbaric' or 'uncivilized' is expressed in 'the greater or lesser discomfort we feel towards people who discuss or mention their bodily functions more openly, who conceal and restrain these functions less than we do'.⁽⁴¹⁾ 'Formerly,' suggested another etiquette manual in 1672, 'one was allowed to take from one's mouth what one could not eat and drop it on the floor, providing it was done skilfully. Now that would be disgusting'.⁽⁴²⁾

Elias described medieval society as being characterised generally by 'a lesser degree of social control and constraint of instinctual life',⁽⁴³⁾ particularly by a violence which dominated everyday life and was rarely subject to much social or self-control. His interpretation of his evidence was that it suggested 'unimaginable emotional outbursts in which - with rare exceptions - everyone who is able abandons himself to the extreme pleasures of ferocity, murder, torture, destruction, and sadism'.⁽⁴⁴⁾ The general behaviour of medieval knights was captured with the example Bernard de Cazenac, who spent his days plundering churches, attacking pilgrims, oppressing widows and orphans, and taking pleasure in 'mutilating the innocent', as well as that of his wife, who had women's 'breasts hacked off or their nails torn off'.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Elias felt that there was great pleasure in killing and torturing, describing it as 'a socially permitted pleasure'; indeed, to some degree 'the social structure even pushed its members in this direction, making it seem necessary and practically advantageous to behave in this way'.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The social process of 'courtization' subjected first knights and warriors, and then ever-expanding circles of the population,⁽⁴⁷⁾ to an increasing demand that such expressions of violence be regulated, that emotions and impulses be placed more firmly in the service of the long-term requirements of complex networks of social interaction. Slowly and gradually, argued Elias, 'the code of behaviour becomes stricter and the degree of consideration expected of others becomes greater,' and 'the social imperative not to offend others becomes more binding'.⁽⁴⁸⁾ In court society we see the beginnings of a form of mutual and self-observation which Elias referred to as a 'psychological' form of perception.

The new stage of courtesy and its representation, summed up in the concept of civilite, is very closely bound up with this manner of seeing, and gradually becomes more so. In order to be really "courteous" by the standards of civilite, one is to some extent obliged to observe, to look about oneself and pay attention to people and their motives.....The increasing tendency of people to observe themselves and others is one sign of how the whole question of behaviour is now taking on a different character: people mold themselves and others more deliberately than in the Middle Ages.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Elias did not see courts as the 'cause' or driving force of this process, but as its nucleus, and he drew a parallel with the form taken by a chemical process like crystallization, 'in which a liquid...[being] subjected to conditions of chemical change.....first takes on crystalline form at a small nucleus, while the rest then gradually crystallized around this core'. However, 'nothing would be more erroneous than to take the core of crystallization for the cause of the transformation'.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The result was a particular kind of habitus or 'second nature', an 'automatic self-restraint, a habit that, within certain limits, also functions when a person is alone'.⁽⁵¹⁾ Elias argued that the restraint imposed by increasingly differentiated and complex networks of social relations became increasingly internalized, and less dependent on its maintenance by external social institutions, developing what Freud was to recognize as a super-ego. Referring to the example of sexual impulses, Elias wrote that they were:

...slowly but progressively suppressed from the public life of society. ....And this restraint, like all others, is enforced less and less by direct physical force. It is cultivated in the individual from an early age as habitual self-restraint by the structure of social life, by the pressure of social institutions in general, and by certain executive organs of society (above all, the family) in particular. Thereby the social commands and prohibitions become increasingly a part of the self, a strictly regulated superego.⁽⁵²⁾

He cautions, too, against seeing a more recent relaxation of moral codes and restrictions as indicating any reversal of the overall process of civilization. For example, Elias felt that increasingly daring bathing costumes and less overt restrictions on speaking about sexual matters and bodily functions were only possible 'in a society in which a high degree of restraint is taken for granted', so that both women and men are 'absolutely sure that each individual is curbed by self-control and a strict code of etiquette', constituting 'a relaxation which remains within the framework of a particular "civilized" standard of behaviour involving a very high degree of automatic constraint and affect-transformation, conditioned to become a habit'.⁽⁵³⁾

He did say that these developments in habitus were not unilinear, that 'the civilizing process does not follow a straight line' and that 'on a smaller scale there are the most diverse crisscross movements, shifts and spurts in this or that direction'.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Nonetheless, at this point he felt that there was a more significant overall tendency with a particular direction, towards increasing 'regulation of affects in the form of self-control'.⁽⁵⁵⁾ 'Regardless,' then, 'of how much the tendencies may criss-cross, advance and recede, relax or tighten on a small scale, the direction of the main movement - as far as is visible up to now - is the same for all kinds of behaviour'.⁽⁵⁶⁾

Elias always asserted that these changes were only comprehensible within developing patterns of social relations and changing social figurations, and it was to the explanation of the transformation of psychic structure revealed by the etiquette books and other historical evidence that he turned in the second volume of The Civilizing Process. 'When enquiring into social processes,' he wrote' 'one must look at the web of human relationships, at society itself, to find the compulsions that keep them in motion, and give them their particular form and their particular direction'.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Of those changes in the 'web of human relationships', Elias regarded two as especially significant. First, there was 'the process of state-formation, and within it the advancing centralization of society',⁽⁵⁸⁾ especially as it was expressed in the absolutist states of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Second, he stressed the gradual differentiation of society, the increasing range, diversity and interdependence of competing social positions and functions composing European societies. There were other, related changes which he also mentioned, such as the development of a money economy and urbanization, but it was these two processes of social development which he placed most emphasis on. In Elias's words: 'What lends the civilizing process in the West its special and unique character is the fact that here the division of functions has attained a level, the monopolies of force and taxation a solidity, and interdependence and competition an extent, both in terms of physical space and of numbers of people involved, unequalled in world history'.⁽⁵⁹⁾

There was, Elias believed, a powerful 'logic' built into any configuration of competing social units, such as states, towns or communities, towards an increasing monopolization of power and, correspondingly, of the means of violence. He saw this 'logic' as emerging from the dynamics of social, political and economic competition, and saw it as being organised around two 'mechanisms': the 'monopoly mechanism', which 'once set in motion, proceeds like clockwork',⁽⁶⁰⁾ and the 'royal mechanism'. The operation of the 'monopoly mechanism was summarized as follows:

....in a major social unit.....a large number of the smaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the larger one, are of roughly equal social power and are thus able to compete freely - unhampered by pre-existing monopolies - for the means to social power, i.e. primarily the means of subsistence and production, the probability is high that some will be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer and fewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will be eliminated from the competition, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on an ever-decreasing number.⁽⁶¹⁾

Unless some countervailing process is set in motion, argued Elias, competition would generally drive any human figuration towards 'a state in which all opportunities are controlled by a single authority: a system with open opportunities has become a system with closed opportunities'.⁽⁶²⁾

Elias argued that accompanying the monopoly mechanism was another tendency, that of what he called the 'royal mechanism', which was a feature of the evenness or indecisiveness of any pattern of competition. If social conditions are not bad enough for any one group to risk the loss of their current position, and power is distributed so evenly that every group is fearful of any other group gaining the slightest advantage, 'they tie each other's hands' and ' this gives the central authority better chances than any other constellation within society'.⁽⁶³⁾ The general principle of the 'royal mechanism' is thus:

....the hour of the strong central authority within a highly differentiated society strikes when the ambivalence of interests of the most important functional groups grows so large, and power is distributed so evenly between them, that there can be neither a decisive compromise nor a decisive conflict between them.⁽⁶⁴⁾

The position of a central authority is, then, not based simply on some greater power that they might have over any other social unit, but on their function as a mediator or nodal point for the conflicts between the other groups in society, which can neither individually overcome any of the others, nor stop competing to the degree required to form an effective alliance with each other.

The consequence of these mechanisms in terms of power relations was not, however, simply to increase the power-chances of those individuals and groups in more central positions of authority and influence, which is how we usually think of any process of monopolization. Elias emphasised that 'the more people are made dependent by the monopoly mechanism, the greater becomes the power of the dependent, not only individually but also collectively, in relation to the one or more monopolists'. This was because those in the more central, monopoly positions were also made increasingly dependent on 'ever more dependents in preserving and exploiting the power potential they have monopolized'.⁽⁶⁵⁾ The greater monopolization of power-chances is thus accompanied by a greater collective democratization, at least, because a monopoly position is itself dependent on a larger and more complex network of social groups and units. A useful example here would be the position of the head of government in any of the advanced industrial countries.

It was the 'monopoly mechanism' and the 'royal mechanism', felt Elias, which lay at the heart of the state-formation process in Europe, which was in turn necessarily accompanied by an increasing monopolization of the means of violence, and a pressure towards other means of exercising power in social relations. Rather than the use of violence, social 'success' is more and more dependent on 'continuous reflection, foresight, and calculation, self-control, precise and articulate regulation of one's own affects, knowledge of the whole terrain, human and non-human, in which one acts.'⁽⁶⁶⁾

Elias argued that this 'rationalization' of human conduct, its placement at the service of long-term goals and the increasing internalization of social constraint was closely tied to the process of state formation and development of monopolies of physical force:

The peculiar stability of the apparatus of mental self-restraint which emerges as a decisive trait built into the habitus of every "civilized" human being, stands in the closest relationship to the monopolization of physical force and the growing stability of the central organs of society. Only with the formation of this kind of relatively stable monopolies do societies acquire those characteristics as a result of which the individuals forming them get attuned, from infancy, to a highly regulated and differentiated pattern of self-restraint; only in conjunction with these monopolies does this kind of self-restraint require a higher degree of automaticity, does it become, as it were, "second nature".⁽⁶⁷⁾

The 'requirement' placed on each individual is not a direct one, but one mediated by one's own reflection on the consequences of differing patterns of behaviour. 'The actual compulsion,' suggested Elias, 'is one that the individual exerts on himself either as a result of his knowledge of the possible consequences of his moves in the game in intertwining activities, or as a result of corresponding gestures of adults which have helped to pattern his own behaviour as a child'.⁽⁶⁸⁾

Underlying the processes of state-formation and nation-building were, secondly, others of increasing social differentiation, increasing density, complexity, and what Elias called 'lengthening chains of social interdependence'. In his words:

The closer the web of interdependencies becomes in which the individual is enmeshed with the advancing division of functions, the larger the social spaces over which this network extends and which become integrated into functional or institutional units - the more threatened is the social existence of the individual who gives way to spontaneous impulses and emotions, the greater is the social advantage of those able to moderate their affects, and the more strongly is each individual constrained from an early age to take account of the effects of his own or other people's actions on a whole series of links in the social chain.⁽⁶⁹⁾

A central developmental process in European societies was their increasing density, produced by a combination of population growth and urbanization, and the ever-larger circles of people that any single individual would be interdependent with, no matter how fleetingly.

He spoke of the 'conveyor belts' running through individuals' lives growing 'longer and more complex',⁽⁷⁰⁾ requiring us to 'attune' our conduct to the actions of others,⁽⁷¹⁾ and becoming the dominant influence on our existence, so that we are less 'prisoners of our passions' and more captive to the requirements of an increasingly complex 'web of actions',⁽⁷²⁾ particularly a demand for 'constant hindsight and foresight in interpreting the actions and intentions of others'.⁽⁷³⁾ Just as important as the 'length' of chains of interdependence was the increasing ambivalence of overlapping and multiple networks: as social relations become more complex and contradictory, the same people or groups could be 'friends, allies or partners' in one context and 'opponents, competitors or enemies' in another. 'This fundamental ambivalence of interests,' wrote Elias, is 'one of the most important structural characteristics of more highly developed societies, and a chief factor moulding civilized conduct'.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Elias saw human conduct as subject to a variety of civilizing processes, all of which 'tend to produce a transformation of the whole drive and affect economy in the direction of a more continuous, stable and even regulation of drives and affects in all areas of conduct, in all sectors of his life'.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The growing interdependence produced by increasingly intense social differentiation, as well as the monopolization of violence by the state, meant that:

...a social apparatus is established in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints. These self-constraints, a function of the perpetual hindsight and foresight instilled in the individual from childhood in accordance with his integration in extensive chains of action, have partly the form of conscious self-control and partly that of automatic habit.⁽⁷⁶⁾

We are all compelled more and more to regulate our conduct 'in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner'. Reiterating his formulations in The Court Society, Elias referred to this increasing self-regulation as a process of 'psychologization' and 'rationalization', because it revolved around the growing reflexive understanding of our own actions, those of others, their interrelationships and their consequences. The effect of this on our habitus is that:

...the more complex and stable control of conduct is increasingly instilled in the individual from his earliest years as an automatism, a self-compulsion that he cannot resist even if he consciously wishes to. The web of actions grows so complex and extensive, the effort required to behave "correctly" within it becomes so great, that beside the individual's conscious self-control an automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control is firmly established.⁽⁷⁷⁾

Later he described the internalisation of a disciplined sense of time as a 'paradigmatic'⁽⁷⁸⁾ example of this establishment of an automatic apparatus of self-regulation.⁽⁷⁹⁾ Although there may be counter-movements, periods of more uneven development and variations between countries and regions, 'the general direction of the change in conduct, the "trend" of the movement in civilization, is everywhere the same'. The development of habitus 'always veers towards a more or less automatic self-control, to the subordination of short-term impulses to the commands of a more complex and secure "super-ego" agency'.⁽⁸⁰⁾ The dynamics of this development, Elias felt, was also always the same in Western societies, beginning with 'small leading groups' and then affecting 'broader and broader strata',⁽⁸¹⁾ not through some process of 'diffusion', but resulting from the dynamics of social competition.

There were, finally, three important qualifications which Elias had to repeat on a number of occasions in response to his critics. First, he maintained that his concept of a civilizing process in European social history did not imply the existence any sort of original 'state of nature' in some early historical period. There is 'no zero point in the historicity of human development',⁽⁸²⁾ no example of human existence in which there were no social constraints built into the development of all human individuals from infancy to whatever their society regarded as adulthood. Second, he also suggested that there was no particular beginning to the civilizing process, so that in any given period people will regard themselves as more civilized than the peoples in the preceding periods. 'Wherever we start,' he wrote, 'there is movement, something that went before'.⁽⁸³⁾ Third, he also felt that civilizing processes were never-ending, and that we can never regard ourselves as having attained a state of 'true' civilization, certainly not in contemporary societies. Unlike Marx, then, he did not anticipate an 'end' to history. Although he was confident that considerable social development had taken place since antiquity, he was equally sure that we had by no means stopped 'civilizing' ourselves and each other, which was why the final line in The Civilizing Process included these words from Holbach: 'la civilisation....n'est pas encore terminèe'.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Later he said: 'The civilization of which I speak is never completed and always endangered'.⁽⁸⁵⁾

The Civilizing Process was completed in 1939, and both Elias himself and his interpreters, supportive as well as critical, have tended towards the view that his understanding of the development and dynamics of Western societies did not change substantially afterwards. The development of Elias's ideas between the 1960s and 1980s reveals, however, a more nuanced picture, and his writings can be regarded as ranging from a reiteration of his arguments in The Court Society and The Civilizing Process, through a development or refinement of his ideas, to a distinct change of direction and emphasis. How his later thoughts were spread along this continuum is the topic of the next section.

Decivilizing and informalization processes
The first theme is the contradictory and ambivalent character of processes of civilization, their 'dark' sides and the question of 'civilized barbarism'. The second is the process of 'informalization', developing a point made in The Civilizing Process concerning how increased self-restraint can manifest itself in an apparent relaxation of norms surrounding a variety of human activities. Finally, Elias drew attention to the significance of what Mannheim referred to as 'the problem of generations', the structure and distribution of opportunities and power between the established generation and the next, and the role that this can play in explaining a range of social and political events such as the youth rebellions of the 1960s and, more particularly, German terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s.

The first important feature of Elias's thinking in The Germans was the attention he paid to the question of 'modern barbarism'. In The Civilizing Process, the relationship between barbarism and civilization had been presented largely as mutually exclusive, one turning into the other, with possible 'reversals' of direction. To a large extent The Germans is consistent with this line of argument, raising the possibility that specific processes of state-formation produce either a 'deficient' process of civilization, or result in a clear process of decivilization encouraging the more widespread manifestation of brutal and violent conduct. However, Elias also raised the possibility that civilization and decivilization can occur simultaneously. For example, he made the point that the monopolization of physical force by the state, through the military and the police, cuts in two directions and has a Janus-faced character,⁽⁸⁶⁾ because such monopolies of force can then be all the more effectively wielded by powerful groups within any given nation-state, as indeed they did under the Nazi regime. Pursuing a line of thought he had been developing since the 1970s,⁽⁸⁷⁾ in one of his entries to a German dictionary of sociology published in 1986 he argued for the reversibility of social processes, and suggested that 'shifts in one direction can make room for shifts in the opposite direction,' so that 'a dominant process directed at greater integration could go hand in hand with a partial disintegration'.⁽⁸⁸⁾ Similarly, in The Germans he remarked that the example of the Hitler regime showed 'not only that processes of growth and decay can go hand in hand but that the latter can also predominate relative to the former'.⁽⁸⁹⁾ In a critique of Kingsley Davis' understanding of social norms, he argued that Davis emphasised the integrative effect of norms at the expense of their 'dividing and excluding character'. Elias pointed out that social norms had an 'inherently double-edged character', since in the very process of binding some people together, they turn those people against others. Critics like Stefan Breuer, however, have remarked that a central problem with Elias's work overall is his disinclination to perceive processes of social integration as being accompanied by other, equally significant processes of social disintegration and decomposition,⁽⁹⁰⁾ and we will examine the extent to which remarks such as these by Elias deal with this apparently more pervasive feature of his work in the final section of this chapter.

Third, Elias developed a point he had made in The Civilizing Process concerning the effects of increasing self-restraint on the character of explicit rules and norms governing human behaviour. As social restraint becomes increasingly 'second nature' to individuals, social rules and sanctions become less significant and we can observe a more relaxed and informal attitude to manners and etiquette. He referred to a general relaxation of norms in the period after World War I, in relation to what is said about natural functions as well as 'modern bathing and dancing practices', and argued that this was:

...only possible because the level of habitual, technically and institutionally consolidated self-control, the individual capacity to restrain one's urges and behaviour in correspondence with the more advanced feelings for what is offensive, has on the whole been secured. It is a relaxation within the framework of an already established standard.⁽⁹¹⁾

Elias introduced the concept of the 'informalization process' to to capture this dimension of civilizing processes, although it was first used and developed by the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters.⁽⁹²⁾ Using the example of sexual behaviour, Elias argued that a less authoritarian system of sexual norms actually increases the demands made on each individual to regulate their own behaviour, or suffer the consequences. Regarding intimate relationships, he said that:

...the main burden of shaping life together...now lies on the shoulders of the individuals concerned. Thus informalization brings with it stronger demands on apparatuses of self-constraint, and, at the same time, frequent experimentation and structural insecurity; one cannot really follow existing models, one has to work out for oneself a dating strategy as well as a strategy for living together through a variety of ongoing experiments.⁽⁹³⁾

Elias said the same of the more informal relations between superiors and subordinates in the workplace, which also requires a greater degree of self-restraint in the absence of formal, explicit rules and formulae governing everyday conduct.

As power relations change and the rules of human interaction become less formalized and routinized, more flexible, we are all compelled to develop a more self-reflexive and sophisticated apparatus of self-regulation to be able to negotiate such an ever-changing and contingent network of social relationships. The declining relevance of an established code of behaviour 'inevitably brings with it a widespread feeling of uncertainty to many people who are caught up in the turmoil of change'.⁽⁹⁴⁾ What we might perceive, then, as an increase in individual 'freedom' is actually a greater demand for self-compulsion and self-management. It is at this point where Elias's ideas link up with those of Foucault on 'governmentality' in liberal democracies,⁽⁹⁵⁾ and they suggest a re-thinking of his views on sexuality as being increasingly 'hidden behind the scenes' or 'constrained' - we will examine this question in the next section.

Fourth, Elias also drew attention to an issue which he had only touched on in The Civilizing Process, namely that processes of social change could only be properly understood in terms of a relation between generations, between dominant social groups growing older and gradually losing their dominance and rising younger groups striving to improve their position within the established power relations. Karl Mannheim had referred to this as 'The problem of generations' in an essay first published in 1928.⁽⁹⁶⁾ Mannheim's piece engaged in some important conceptual ground-clearing, making a variety of important points about how the social phenomenon of 'generations' emerges from the biological facts of ageing and physical reproduction, including how a variety of socially-conditioned 'generation units' can exist within the same physical generation and the relationship between generational conflict and the rate of social change. Elias fleshed out and expanded on Mannheim's arguments in a comparison of the structural position of right-wing German youth groups in the 1920s and 1930s, and left-right terrorist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, both examples of outbreaks of organized violence within state-societies which had otherwise more or less monopolized the means of violence.

The central point around which Elias's arguments revolve is the idea that although any given younger generation strives for meaning and personal fulfilment as well as for opportunities and power, those opportunities can widen or narrow depending on particular historical configurations. He commented that 'it is easy to distinguish between periods with comparatively open channels for upward mobility for the younger generations, and other periods in which these channels become narrower and narrower and perhaps for a while even become completely blocked'.⁽⁹⁷⁾ More generally:

The narrowing and widening of life chances, and opportunities for meaning in general and career chances in particular, for the younger generations of a society at any one time are processes that undoubtedly most strongly affect the balance of power between the generations. One could say that these processes form the kernel of social conflicts between the generations .⁽⁹⁸⁾

Elias felt that although the processes of succession of generations can to some extent be managed by established older groups, the overall opportunity structure for rising generations was largely unplanned and resistant to conscious control. For example, periods of peace are in fact times when 'the circulation of generations becomes more sluggish',⁽⁹⁹⁾ whereas periods of war tend to open up new opportunities for the younger generation. Indeed, Elias suggested that one of the bases of Hitler's success among young Germans was the fact that his particular mobilisation of the nationalist ideology of the German Volk opened up a number of paths to greater life chances than had been possible under the Weimar Republic, so that the conflicts between the Weimar regime and both the Freikorps and the National Socialists more generally were 'thus bound up most closely with an inter-generational conflict'.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

What the youth groups in the 1930s and the 1960s had in common was the fact that they found their search for a meaningful life blocked by the social order held in place by the older generation. Their definition of what constituted a meaningful life was, of course, very different. However, 'the basic motivation was the same: the feeling of being trapped in a social system which made it very hard for the younger generations to find chances for a meaningful future'.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ The differences emerge from the different kind of 'generation units' which experienced this blockage of perceived opportunity: in the 1920s and early 1930s the young people who felt frustrated by the Weimar regime were largely of middle-class background, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s there was a larger mixture of middle-class and working-class youth feeling oppressed by the apparent meaninglessness and lack of purpose in modern society. Ideologies of national identity also operated in quite different ways in the two periods, and in the 1960s it was experienced more as part of the establishment's attempts to contain the aspirations of all youth. The fact that large numbers of people had been so very recently been murdered in the name of nationhood had made it virtually impossible for any young person to support any form of nationalism 'without rousing the suspicion that one was a latter-day ally of the nationalistic father'.⁽¹⁰²⁾

Elias argued, then, that a left-wing position informed by Marxist conceptions of social and economic inequality had four functions for young Germans in the 1960s and 1970s:

...they served them as a means of purification from the curse of National Socialism; as a means of orientation through which to interpret the social character of the Nazi period as well as of contemporary society; as a vehicle for fighting against the older, established generations, against their fathers, the bourgeoisie; and as a model of an alternative society, a meaning-giving utopia against which one could critically expose one's own society's defects.⁽¹⁰³⁾

He went on to suggest that part of the opposition to their parents' self-assured confidence in the superiority of European civilization, arising from the growing critical understanding of European colonialism and imperialism, was a particular ethical stance in which the younger generations 'were in many cases inclined to regard just those groups who are oppressed as better and more worthy in human terms',⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ so that demonstrable oppression automatically made any given group more or less immune from moral criticism unless it came from within.

In general terms, The Germans constitutes an important development in Elias's thinking, clarifying a number of aspects of his understanding of the relationship between civilization and barbarism. He pointed out that a large part of his motivation in writing The Civilizing Process was precisely to come to a better understanding of the brutality of the Nazi regime, since 'one cannot understand the breakdown of civilized behaviour and feeling as long as one cannot understand and explain how civilized behaviour and feeling came to be constructed and developed in European societies in the first place'.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ In other words, Elias was advancing the very important argument that barbarism and civilization are part of the same analytical problem, namely how and under what conditions human beings satisfy their individual or group needs 'without reciprocally destroying, frustrating, demeaning or in other ways harming each other time and time again in their search for this satisfaction'.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ The problem for Elias was both to make events such as the Holocaust - and one could add any number of other examples of 'modern barbarism' - understandable as the outcome of particular social figurations and processes of socio-historical development, and also to explain what it was about the development of modern state-societies which generated organized critical responses to such large-scale genocide.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾

TOWARDS A THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY
Elias always refrained from making the claim that he was developing a 'theoretical system' because he wanted to avoid the tendency towards fetishising theory, theorists and theoretical perspectives, at the expense of getting on with the practice of sociological investigation. Elias preferred simply to develop his conceptual framework in the process of conducting his research, and thus overcome the divide between theory and research which still plagues sociology. But it was, nonetheless, an ambitious theoretical system. As he put it, he saw his task as one of drawing on the work of Marx, Weber and Freud, inter alia, and 'elaborating a comprehensive theory of human society, or, more exactly, a theory of the development of humanity, which could provide an integrating framework of reference for the various specialist social sciences'.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ All of the conceptual arguments he engaged in throughout his writings are part of this 'comprehensive theory', each of them interlinked with the others.

In the process, Elias was also concerned to develop a different form of perception of the social world.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ He believed that many of the problems and obstacles in contemporary social science were built into the very categories and concepts which thought about society and human behaviour was organized around. His work consists in large measure of an argument for a particular sociological vocabulary and conceptual framework, which in turn has embedded within it a form of social perception he believed would get closer to the reality of human social life. A number of concepts are important here: figuration, process, habitus, civilization, relation, network/web, power-ratio, interdependence, established/outsiders, involvement/detachment, not only in themselves, but also as radical alternatives to the standard concepts used by most sociologists in the second half of the twentieth century: society, system, structure, role, action, interaction, individual, reproduction.

Although he was willing to present his sociological theory for some time as organised around the concept of 'figuration', he grew to dislike the term 'figurational sociology' and ended up preferring 'process sociology' as a label. It should be said, however, that even this was insufficient, in that he was not adopting a pluralist position, arguing for one approach among many, but for how all sociology should be approached, and in this sense even 'process sociology' is inadequate to the extent that it suggests that it is possible to pursue a non-process sociology.

The basic elements of Elias's process sociology were:

1. an understanding of social life as the unplanned and unintended outcome of the interweaving of intentional human actions;

2. an approach to human beings as interdependent, forming figurations or networks with each other which connect the psychological with the social, or habitus with social relations;

3. a focus on relations rather than states;

4. a related concern with dynamic processes of development and change, rather than static structures;

5. an approach to sociology as the attempt to develop as 'adequate' a relation to the real world as possible, namely one which 'works' best in the solution of basic problems of human existence and maximises collective control over the human world.

Unplanned 'Order' And The Question Of Agency
Elias also sets out from the problem of how to explain the orderliness of social life, and sees sociology as fundamentally concerned with a 'problem of order; but from a very particular perspective. He did not see the very existence of 'social order' itself as problematic, saying that he understood the concept 'in the same sense that one talks of a natural order, in which decay and destruction as structured processes have their place alongside growth and synthesis, death and disintegration alongside birth and integration'.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ He directed his attention to a very different question, namely, the apparent independence of social order from intentional human action. For Elias, the question was: 'How does it happen at all that formations arise in the human world that no single human being has intended, and which yet are anything but cloud formations without stability or structure?'.⁽¹¹¹⁾ It was the slowly dawning awareness from about the French Revolution onwards that, just as social life was not determined by God or supernatural forces, it was also not determined by the intentions of human beings, which Elias felt contributed to the emergence of sociology as a discipline. In his words:

If one does not ask merely for a definition of society, but rather for the experiences which cradled a science of society, this was one of them: the experience that although people form societies and keep society moving by their actions and plans, at the same time society seems often to go its own way and, while being driven by those who form them, at the same time, seems to drive them.⁽¹¹²⁾

The thinkers who first contributed to this developing awareness included, suggested Elias, Adam Smith, Hegel, the Physiocrats, Malthus, Marx and Comte. Hegel's concept of the 'cunning of reason' was one of the first attempts to capture this 'ordered autonomy' of social life from the individuals who make it up:

Again and again...people stand before the outcome of their own actions like the apprentice magician before the spirits he has conjured up and which, once at large, are no longer in his power. They look with astonishment at the convolutions and formations of the historical flow which they themselves constitute but do not control.⁽¹¹³⁾

The most acute problem for Elias was the apparent lack of relationship between social order and human intentions, the seemingly alien character of the social world to the individuals making it up.

Elias saw 'society' as consisting of the structured interweaving of the activity of interdependent human agents, all pursuing their own interests and goals, producing distinct social forms such as what we call 'Christianity', 'feudalism', 'patriarchy', 'capitalism', or whatever culture and nation we happen to be part of, which cannot be said to have been planned or intended by any individual or group.

In analysing the relationship between intentional human action and unplanned surrounding social preconditions and outcomes, Elias emphasized, on the one hand, the dependence of any given individual, no matter how central a position they held, on the surrounding network of social, economic and political relations. 'No individual person, no matter how great his stature, how powerful his will, how penetrating his intelligence, can breach the autonomous laws of the human network from which his actions arise and into which the are directed'.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ He indicated a very clear preference for understanding social transformations in terms of changes in social conditions, or in the structuring of social relationships, rather than attributing very much causal significance to the decisions and actions of particular, supposedly powerful individuals or groups.⁽¹¹⁵⁾

On the other hand, although within the broad sweep of history it is apparent how much individuals are buffeted by forces beyond their control, 'the person acting within the flow may have a better chance to see how much can depend on individual people in individual situations, despite the general direction'.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ It is equally unrealistic to believe 'that people are interchangeable, the individual being no more than the passive vehicle of a social machine'.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Elias saw social life as both 'firm' and 'elastic': 'Crossroads appear at which people must choose, and on their choices, depending on their social position, may depend either their immediate personal fate or that of a whole family, or, in certain circumstances, of entire nations or groups within them'.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ Agency thus consisted of the strategic seizure of opportunities which arise for individuals and groups, but not in the actual creation of those opportunities, which 'are prescribed and limited by the specific structure of his society and the nature of the functions the people exercise within it'.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ Moreover, once an opportunity is taken, human action 'becomes interwoven with those of others; it unleashes further chains of actions', the effects of which are based not on individual or group actors, but 'on the distribution of power and the structure of tensions within this whole mobile human network'.⁽¹²⁰⁾

One of the primary focuses of sociological analysis is, then, the relationships between intentional, goal-directed human activities and the unplanned or unconscious process of interweaving with other such activities, past and present, and their consequences. Often Elias emphasized the unplanned character of social life, largely because he was concerned to counter the notion that there can ever be a direct and straightforward relationship between human action and its outcomes. However, all his observations taken together indicate a more complex understanding, for he always believed that improved human control of social life was the ultimate objective of sociological analysis. In his words, 'people can only hope to master and make sense out of these purposeless, meaningless functional interconnections if they can recognize them as relatively autonomous, distinctive functional interconnections, and investigate them systematically'.⁽¹²¹⁾ Elias saw an understanding of long-term unplanned changes as serving both 'an improved orientation' towards social processes which lie beyond human planning, and an improved understanding of those areas of social life which can be said to correspond to the goals and intentions of human action.⁽¹²²⁾ In relation to technological change, he commented: 'From the viewpoint of a process theory what is interesting is the interweaving of an unplanned process and human planning'.⁽¹²³⁾

Interdependence - Figurations - Habitus
For Elias, the structure and dynamics of social life could only be understood if human beings were conceptualized as interdependent rather than autonomous, comprising what he called figurations rather than social systems or structures, and as characterized by socially and historically specific forms of habitus, or personality-structure. He emphasised seeing human beings in the plural rather than the singular, as part of collectivities, of groups and networks, and stressed that their very identity as unique individuals only existed within and through those networks or figurations.

The civilizing process itself, argued Elias, had produced a capsule or wall around individual experience dividing an inner world from the external world, individuals from society, and this had come to be reproduced within sociological theory itself. Rather than seeing individuals as ever having any autonomous, pre-social existence, Elias emphasised human beings' interdependence with each other, the fact that one can only become an individual human being within a web of social relationships and within a network of interdependencies with ones family, school, church, community, ethnic group, class, gender, work organisation, and so on. The essential 'relatedness' of human beings, said Elias, began with being born as a helpless infant, over which we have no control: 'Underlying all intended interactions of human beings is their unintended interdependence'.⁽¹²⁴⁾

He developed this point in part through his critique of what he called the homo clausus, or 'closed personality' image of humans. Elias argued for a replacement of this homo clausus conception with its emphasis on autonomy, freedom and independent agency with:

....the image of man as an "open personality" who possesses a greater or lesser degree of relative (but never absolute and total) autonomy vis-a-vis other people and who is, in fact, fundamentally oriented toward and dependent on other people throughout his life. The network of interdependencies among human beings is what binds them together. Such interdependencies are the nexus of what is here called the figuration, a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people. Since people are more or less dependent on each other first by nature and then through social learning, through education, socialization, and socially generated reciprocal needs, they exist, one might venture to say, only as pluralities, only in figurations.⁽¹²⁵⁾

Elias introduced the concept of 'figuration' in the 1960s because it 'puts the problem of human interdependencies into the very heart of sociological theory'⁽¹²⁶⁾ and he hoped it would 'eliminate the antithesis....immanent today in the use of the words "individual" and "society"'.⁽¹²⁷⁾

Before he started using the word 'configuration' in 1965 and then 'figuration' from 1969 onwards, the German concept he used was Verflechtungsmechanismus, or 'mechanism of interweaving'. Elias felt it expressed 'what we call "society" more clearly and unambiguously than the existing conceptual tools of sociology, as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society, nor a "system" or "totality" beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by individuals'.⁽¹²⁸⁾ Elias regarded societies as basically 'the processes and structures of interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people'.⁽¹²⁹⁾ He also believed that it made it easier to overcome the tendency to apparently deny human agency and individuality with the use of concepts like 'society' or 'social system'. Indeed, 'it sharpens and deepens our understanding of individuality if people are seen as forming figurations with other people'.⁽¹³⁰⁾

Unlike 'system', it also did not convey the suggestion of harmony or integration characterizing the organic or machine analogy; it referred to 'harmonious, peaceful and friendly relationships between people, as well as to hostile and tense relationships'.⁽¹³¹⁾ This means that figurations are always organised around the dynamic operation of power:

At the core of changing figurations - indeed the very hub of the figuration process - is a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro, inclining first to the one side and then to the other. This kind of fluctuating balance of power is a structural characteristic of the flow of every figuration.⁽¹³²⁾

It was 'a generic concept for the pattern which interdependent human beings, as groups or as individuals, form with each other',⁽¹³³⁾ and Elias saw the analysis of the formation of dynamic figurations as 'one of the central questions, perhaps even the central question, of sociology'.⁽¹³⁴⁾ Indeed, 'it is this network of the functions which people have for each other, it and nothing else, what we call "society". It represents a special kind of sphere. Its structures are what we call "social structures". And if we talk of "social laws" or "social regularities", we are referring to nothing other than this: the autonomous laws of relations between people'.⁽¹³⁵⁾

He used the analogy of dance to illustrate the concept figuration, saying that 'the image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor perhaps makes it easier to imagine state, cities, families, and also capitalist, communist, and feudal systems as figurations'.⁽¹³⁶⁾ Although we might speak of 'dance in general', 'no one will imagine a dance as a structure outside the individual'. Dances can be danced by different people, 'but without a plurality of reciprocally oriented and dependent individuals, there is no dance'. Figurations, like dances, are thus 'relatively independent of the specific individuals forming it here and now, but not of individuals as such'.⁽¹³⁷⁾ In other words, although it is true that figurations 'have the peculiarity that, with few exceptions, they can continue to exist even when all the individuals who formed them at a certain time have died and been replaced by others',⁽¹³⁸⁾ they only exist in and through the activity of their participants. When that activity stops, the figuration stops, and the continued existence of the figuration is dependent on the continued participation of its constituent members, as the East European communist countries discovered in 1989. Figurations 'have a relative independence of particular individuals, but not of individuals as such'.⁽¹³⁹⁾

It is difficult to overemphasise the significance of Elias's concept of figuration for sociological theory. Despite David Lockwood's argument that the distinction often made between social integration - 'the orderly or conflictual relationships between the actors' - and system integration - 'the orderly or conflictual relationships between the parts, of a social system' is 'wholly artificial',⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ sociologists, as we can see from the persistence of the agency/structure dichotomy, continue to operate as if the distinction was a real one. Nicos Mouzelis, for example, has argued recently for the retention of the concept 'structure' alongside that of 'figuration', suggesting that 'the complex ways in which figurations, institutional structures and structures in Giddens' sense are linked to each other constitutes one of the most interesting problems in sociological theory'.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ This position rests on an understanding of 'figuration' as referring only to actor-actor relations, leaving the question of actor-institution or institution-institution relations unexamined, for which we need the concepts 'structure' and 'institutional structure'. However, it is unlikely that Elias would have accepted this interpretation of 'figuration'. His position was a more radical one, in that for him 'structures' consisted of actor-actor relations. In other words, 'figuration' was intended to capture exactly what is normally referred to with concepts such as 'structure' or 'system integration'. For Elias structures are figurations, they can only be understood as being constituted by acting human beings, and the concept figuration is intended to dissolve the distinction between system and social integration, not take its place within it.

The dynamics of figurations are also dependent on the formation of a shared social habitus or personality make-up which constitutes the collective basis of individual human conduct. In his words:

This make-up, the social habitus of individuals forms, as it were, the soil from which grow the personal characteristics through which an individual differs from other members of his society. In this way something grows out of the common language which the individual shares with others and which is certainly a component of his social habitus - a more or less individual style, what might be called an unmistakable individual handwriting that grows out of the social script.⁽¹⁴²⁾

Elias gave the example of the concept of 'national character', which he called 'a habitus problem par excellence'.⁽¹⁴³⁾ He also referred to is as 'second nature', or 'an automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control'.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ The organisation of psychological make-up into a habitus was also, for Elias, a continuous process which began at birth and continued throughout a person's childhood and youth. It is, he wrote,

....the web of social relations in which the individual lives during his more impressionable phase, during childhood and youth, which imprints itself upon his unfolding personality where it has its counterpart in the relationship between his controlling agencies, super-ego and ego, and his libidinal impulses. The resulting balance between controlling agencies and drives on a variety of levels determines how an individual person steers himself in his relations with others; it determines that which we call, according to taste, habits, complexes or personality structure.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾

Moreover, the development of habitus continued through a person's life, 'for although the self-steering of a person, malleable during childhood, solidifies and hardens as he grows up, it never ceases entirely to be affected by his changing relations with others throughout his life'.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾

Finally, the ways in which the formation of habitus changed over time, what Elias called psychogenesis, could also only be properly understood in connection with changes in the surrounding social relations, or sociogenesis. He argued against the disciplinary separation of psychology, sociology and history as follows:

The structures of the human psyche, the structures of human society and the structures of human history are indissolubly complementary, and can only be studied in conjunction with each other. They do not exist and move in reality with the degree of isolation assumed by current research. They form, with other structures, the subject matter of the single human science.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾

In his critique of Lloyd de Mause's psychogenetic theory of the history of childhood, Elias said that 'psychogenetic studies alone, without the closest connection with sociogenetic studies, are hardly suitable for revealing the structures of social processes. This is only possible with a theory of civilization which links psychogenetic and sociogenetic aspects to each other'.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ The formation of habitus is a function of social interdependencies, which vary as the structure of a society varies. 'To the variation in this structure,' wrote Elias, 'correspond the differences in personality structure than can be observed in history'.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ While he used the notion of 'correspondence' between habitus and social structure in The Civilizing Process,⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ later he modified his position to accommodate the possibility that social habitus might change more slowly than the surrounding social relations.⁽¹⁵¹⁾ Our 'whole outlook on life' said Elias, 'continues to be psychologically tied to yesterday's social reality, although today's and tomorrow's reality already differs greatly from yesterday's'.⁽¹⁵²⁾

Social Life As Relations
Elias consistently maintained that it was necessary for sociologists avoid seeing social life in terms of states, objects or things, what Georgy Lukács called the reificiation of what are in fact dynamic social relationships. His attempt to transcend reification in sociological theory consisted of a double movement: the first was towards a consistent emphasis on social life as relational, and the second was an insistence on its processual character. We will look at the first in this section and the second in the following section. It is important to emphasise both sides of this double movement away from reification, because many sociologists undertake one or the other,⁽¹⁵³⁾ but very few pursue both. All of the rest of his theory flowed in one way or another from this starting point.

The principle is simple enough, that it is necessary in sociology 'to give up thinking in terms of single, isolated substances and to start thinking in terms of relationships and functions'.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ A 'person' or 'individual' is thus not a self-contained entity or unit, she or he does not exist 'in themselves', they only exist as elements of sets of relations with other individuals. The same applies to families, communities, organizations, nations, economic systems, in fact to any aspect of the world, human or natural, for the concept arose from Einstein's physics. Relations between people, the ties binding them to each other are, for Elias, the primary object of sociological study, the very stuff of historical change:

What changes is the way in which people are bonded to each other. This is why their behaviour changes, and why their consciousness and their drive-economy, and, in fact, their personality structure as a whole, change. The "circumstances" which change are not something which comes upon men from "outside": they are the relationships between people themselves.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾

The explanation of any sociological question thus has to focus on the social relations composing the object of study, rather than any of its elements in isolation. This applies even to understanding individual experience; as Elias put it: 'Even the nature and form of his solitude, even what he feels to be his "inner life", is stamped by the history of his relationships - by the structure of the human network in which, as one of its nodal points, he develops and lives as an individual'.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ We have to start, Elias said, 'from the structure of the relations between individuals in order to understand the "psyche" of the individual person'.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

Recently the significance of this has been underlined by Pierre Bourdieu, who defines this form of perception as thinking in terms of fields, a mode of thought which 'requires a conversion of one's entire usual vision of the social world, a vision which is interested only in those things which are visible'.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ Referring to Elias, he points out that thinking non-relationally also has the effect of treating social units as if they were themselves human actors, and mentions the possible 'endless list of mistakes, mystifications or mystiques created by the fact that the words designating institutions or groups, State, bourgeoisie, Employers, Church, Family and School, can be constituted...as historical subjects capable of posing and realizing their own aims'.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

What Elias found most important about relationships between people was the way in which they were constituted as power relations, so that he develops this argument in most detail with reference to 'the relational character of power'.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ He felt that there was a particularly strong tendency to reify power, to treat it as an object which was possessed to a greater or lesser extent. 'The whole sociological and political discussion on power', he wrote, 'is marred by the fact that the dialogue is not consistently focused on power balances and power ratios, that is, on aspects of relationships, but rather on power as if it were a thing.⁽¹⁶¹⁾ If we see it more as a relation, it also becomes possible to recognize that questions of power are quite distinct from questions of 'freedom' and 'domination', and that all human relationships are relations of power.

Building on both Hegel's famous discussion of the master-slave relation and Georg Simmel's reflections on power and domination, Elias wrote:

The master has power over his slave, but the slave also has power over his master, in proportion to his function for the master - his master's dependence on him....In this respect, simply to use the word 'power' is likely to mislead. We say that a person possesses great power, as if power were a thing he carried about in his pocket. This use of the word is a relic of magico-mythical ideas. Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by another; it is a structural characteristic of human relationships - of all human relationships.⁽¹⁶²⁾

He went on to consistently refer to power in terms of power-ratios or 'shifting balances of tensions',⁽¹⁶³⁾ and regarded these concepts as the best successors to debates about freedom and determinism. Referring to Sartre's conception of existential freedom, he said that the recognition that all human beings possess some degree of freedom or autonomy 'is sometimes romantically idealized as proving the metaphysical freedom of man', its popularity arising primarily from its emotional appeal.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ However, he argued that it was important to go beyond thinking in terms of a fictional antithesis between 'freedom' and 'determinism' - fictional because of human beings' essential interdependence - and move to thinking in terms of power-balances.

He stressed the reciprocal workings of power, so that within the network of relations binding the more and less powerful to each other, apparently less powerful groups also exercise a 'boomerang effect' back on those with greater power-chances. As he put it, 'in one form or another the constraints that more powerful groups exert on less powerful ones recoil on the former as constraints of the less powerful on the more powerful and also as compulsions to self-constraint'.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ This was, he felt, a problem with concepts like 'rule' or 'authority', since they 'usually make visible only the pressures exerted from above to below, but not those from below to above'.⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ He gave the example of the relation between parents and children: parents clearly have greater power-chances than their children, but because children fulfil particular functions and needs for their parents, they also have power over their parents, such as calling them to their aid by crying, requiring them to reorganize their lives.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾

To say that the less powerful also exercise power over the more powerful within a power relation, however, only applies to the internal dynamics of that relationship, but not to any capacity to transform it. For example, when one of his assistants, Angela Rijnen, suggested to him that slaves in ancient Rome could have acted on their masters' dependence on them, refused to cooperate on a collective basis, and thus escaped their enslavement. Elias became furious: 'How dare you say something like that?...You must know that the figuration was not of a type that slaves could resist it?'.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ Unlike Foucault, then, Elias did not conceptualize power relations in terms of an opposition between power and resistance, but as consisting of more or less even 'balances' or 'ratios'.

Although Elias's work has much in common with that of Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionist writers, the comparison should be approached with caution, since Elias was never satisfied with the concept of 'social interaction'. He argued that, at best, it only 'scratches the surface of the relatedness of human beings',⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ to the extent that it fails to move beyond the homo clausus model of human beings as possessing some basic identity prior to their interactions with others. Social interaction creates 'the impression of something arising solely from the initiative of two originally independent individuals - an ego and an alter, an 'I' and an'other' - or from the meeting of a number of originally independent individuals'⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ He felt that without an adequate understanding of the essential interdependence of human beings within a wide network of relationships, even theories of interaction would posit a pre-social individual who only became social when they engaged in social interaction.⁽¹⁷¹⁾ The parallel between Elias's approach and symbolic interactionism only holds, then, to the extent that this objection is met.

Against Process-reduction
The second step Elias took away from the reification of social life was to see it as having an inherently processual character, and this needs to be seen in combination with his emphasis on relationism. Figurations of interdependent individuals and groups can only be properly understood as existing over time, in a constant process of dynamic flux and greater or lesser transformation. The analysis of the interrelationships between intentional action and unplanned social processes had to be undertaken over periods of time, for as Johan Goudsblom has put it, 'yesterday's unintended social consequences are today's unintended social conditions of 'intentional human actions'.⁽¹⁷²⁾ Elias spoke of the 'the transformational impetus (Wandlungsimpetus) of every human society', and regarded 'the immanent impetus towards change as an integral moment of every social structure and their temporary stability as the expression of an impediment to social change.⁽¹⁷³⁾

A historical approach to sociological analysis was, in fact, self-evident to most sociologists up to World War II. In The Civilizing Process itself the main disciplinary argument was with psychology, which was why like-minded writers such as Mannheim always spoke of the need for a 'historical psychology';⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ there was no need to argue for a 'historical sociology'. However, Elias pointed out that in the course of the twentieth century a momentum had been building up against theories of 'progress' and 'evolution', especially their normative and teleological dimensions, their assumption that all social change was essentially 'progressive' and that the current form of society was the apex of human development. In the process, social scientists lost interest in development of any sort. Rather than merely rejecting the normative and teleological elements of evolutionary theories, the whole idea of examining long-term processes of change became unfashionable, and most sociologists stopped concerning themselves with a historical approach to their discipline altogether. In Elias's words:

...it is not simply the ideological elements in the nineteenth century sociological concept that have been called into question, but the concept of development itself, the very consideration of problems of long-term social development, of sociogenesis and psychogenesis. In a word, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.⁽¹⁷⁵⁾

The notion that 'present social conditions represent an instant of a continuous process which, coming from the past, moves on through present times towards a future as yet unknown, appears to have vanished'.⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ In 1970 Elias pointed out that where the concept 'development' was used, it was restricted to non-Western, 'underdeveloped' or 'developing' countries, implying that Western, highly-industrialised nations were not in a developing state.⁽¹⁷⁷⁾

The expression Elias used to identify the tendency in sociological thought which he was arguing against was Zustandsreduktion - literally, 'reduction to states', although in English he preferred 'process-reduction', i.e. the 'reduction of processes to static conditions'.⁽¹⁷⁸⁾ A manifestation of process-reduction was sociologists' turning-away from historical analysis, the emphasis by both functionalists and structuralists on synchronic rather than diachronic analysis, and the assumption that stability was the normal condition of social life, and change a 'disruption' of a normal state of equilibrium. By 'long-term' Elias meant periods of not less than three generations.⁽¹⁷⁹⁾

Just as individuals, families, communities, and so on, should be conceived as embedded within a network of relations, rather than being seen as isolated objects, Elias argued that they should also be seen as dynamic, in a state of flux and change, as processes. Individuals, for example, rather than having a fixed identity,

are born as infants, have to be fed and protected for many years by their parents or other adults, who slowly grow up, who then provide for themselves in this or that social position, who may marry and have children of their own, and who finally die. So an individual may justifiably be seen as a self-transforming person who, as it is sometimes put, goes through a process.⁽¹⁸⁰⁾

Indeed, suggested Elias, although it is not how we are used to thinking about ourselves, 'it would be more appropriate to say that a person is constantly in movement; he not only goes through a process, he is a process'.⁽¹⁸¹⁾ We can only understand and explain any given sociological problem if it is seen as the outcome of some long-term process of development, if we trace its sociogenesis.

Instead of speaking of static 'states' or phenomena such as capitalism, rationality, bureaucracy, modernity, postmodernity, Elias would always wish to identify their processual character, so that he would think in terms of rationalization, modernization, bureaucratization, and so on. Often it is difficult to come up with the appropriate concept. For example, 'capitalism' is difficult to render in this way - but the point is to attempt a conceptualization along these lines, to identity the process underlying what one was studying. If, for example, one observes what appear to be a large number of single parents in Western societies, a productive approach for Elias would be to look for the long-term trends in marriage and fertility, to see how this current phenomenon fits in with other processes of social development, in order to possibly explain its occurrence. This example also illustrates Elias's emphasis on the existence of a plurality of processes, all which interweave with each other, with no causal primacy being given to any one of them. Transformations in social relationships are thus intertwined with a variety of other process of change: economic, political, psychological, geographical, and so on. The main long-term trends Elias concentrated on included increasing social differentiation, industrialization, urbanization, political centralization, integration from smaller to larger social units, state formation and nation building, functional democratization, psychologization and rationalization - these will be discussed in the next chapter.

Social processes had no particular beginning; he said: 'Wherever we start, there is movement, something that went before'.⁽¹⁸²⁾ They also have no end, Elias always assumed that we find ourselves in the middle of any given process, and that the point of looking to where it came from was to provide some sense of its future development. He said a number of things about the question of directionality: often he seemed to insist that the overall direction of a long-term trend was all that mattered, and that any divergences from this direction would only be temporary interruptions to the broader tendency. It is this type of argument which leads some critics to regard Elias as a unilinear evolutionist. However, he also said that 'two main directions in the structural changes of societies may be distinguished: those tending toward increased differentiation and integration, and those tending toward decreasing differentiation and integration',⁽¹⁸³⁾ leading commentators such as Peter Burke to describe his theory as multilinear.⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ Any given trend 'is always linked to counter-trends. A trend might remain dominant for a long time; then a counter-trend can again completely or partially gain the upper hand'.⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ This perspective was developed in more detail in his work on twentieth century German history, and the notion of decivilizing processes which underlay particular historical events like the Holocaust. These arguments will also be examined in the next chapter.

A major difference between Elias's approach to long-term social processes and earlier theories of evolutionary change was that he did not think it possible to identify the course of development which had to take place. His explanatory concern was primarily retrospective, focusing on how:

...a figuration had to arise out of a certain figuration or even out of a particular type of sequential series of figurations, but [it] does not assert that the earlier figurations had necessarily to change into the later ones.⁽¹⁸⁶⁾

One could not say that figuration C necessarily had to emerge from figurations A and B, only that C was made possible by the emergence of A and B, that A and B were the necessary preconditions for C. Figuration C was thus only one of the possible successors to A and B, and there is never a necessity or teleology to the social development.

Although Elias did distance himself from theories of social progress which simply assumed that all social change was progressive, he did feel that, overall, humanity was in fact progressing. It is important to bear his fundamentally ambiguous attitude to progress in mind, because it helps explain why so many of his critics accuse him of reverting to the ninteenth century evolutionary perspectives. For example, in 1977 he wrote:

...the twentieth century is an epoch of the greatest experiments and innovations.... Much of what people in earlier times only dreamed of has become 'do-able'. Human knowledge - not only about interconnections in the non-human, natural world, but also about people themselves, on the individual as well as social level - is far more extensive than in the past. The conscious, planned concern with improvement of the social order and human living conditions - as inadequate as it is - has never been greater than it is today.⁽¹⁸⁷⁾

He was also confident that human beings have gradually developed more control over the natural world, and that this increased control could easily be put in the category of 'progress'. Despite the barbarism which Western 'civilized' people were capable of, for Elias this meant merely that 'we have not learnt to control ourselves and nature enough', for he was insistent that the contemporary world was considerably less brutal and violent than it had been in the Ancient or Medieval world. He felt that relations between classes, men and women, superordinates and subordinates, adults and children, were gradually becoming increasingly equal and democratic, and that the point of identifying those instances where this was not the case was to further the process of 'functional democratization', not to suggest its impossibility.

On the other hand, he did also argue that processes of integration could at any time be accompanied by those of disintegration, civilizing processes by decivilizing processes,⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ and he placed more emphasis on these in his later work, such as The Germans. Elias should be read both ways, as optimistic about the progress of humanity, and as acutely aware of how easily we can descend to cruelty barbaric cruelty.

PROCESS SOCIOLOGY EXTENDED

Sociology of Knowledge: Between Involvement And Detachment
One of the fields to which Elias devoted most attention, as a corollary to his concern with civilizing processes, was the sociology of knowledge. Questions of objectivity and values, the position of the social scientist in society, the relation between the natural and social sciences, these were all central to his understanding of the role that knowledge plays in the historical development of humanity. The main features of Elias's sociology of knowledge are:

1 an emphasis on the historical development of human knowledge;

2 an argument for seeing science as a social and collective endeavour, consisting of sets of social institutions located within particular process of social development, rather than springing from the mind of an idealised 'subject' of scientific activity;

3 a rejection of both the concept of 'truth' as absolutely distinct from 'falsity' and a relativistic conception of knowledge, in favour of the concept of a greater or lesser 'object adequacy' in human knowledge, lying somewhere between 'involvement' and 'detachment'.

Commenting on Marx's conception of the relations between 'consciousness' and 'being', Elias mentioned two of the standard criticisms of his approach. First, like many other critics, Elias was uneasy about Marx's apparent economism, and shared Mannheim's more Weberian approach in allowing that a variety of social and group locations beyond the economic contribute to the structuring of cognition and knowledge. In Elias's words, Marx:

...made no allowance for the possibility that equally structured and sociologically explicable types of oppression and exploitation may be practised, for instance, by ruling groups of a state holding the monopoly of physical power and related monopolies, sometimes even in the name of liberation from the economic type of exploitation and oppression.⁽¹⁸⁹⁾

Second, there was the problem of whether human consciousness can be regarded as simply derivate of 'being' or lived experience, or whether consciousness also plays an active role in the development of social relations. In principle Marx himself dealt with the problem in the Theses on Feuerbach, but he had put the determinist argument so firmly elsewhere in his work that most commentators overlooked this more subtle version of his understanding of ideology, and Elias also felt that this apparent 'dualistic' conception of the relation between consciousness and society was an obstacle to the further development of the sociology of knowledge.

Having said that, however, Elias also felt that an important element of Marx's perspective had been overlooked by contemporary sociologists of knowledge, namely his conception of social relations as developing over time. In dispensing with the notion of 'progress', sociologists had come to neglect the whole question of historical development. Elias argued in 1971 that most sociological theories of knowledge were dominated by the attempt 'to explain the nexus of ideas, of thoughts, of knowledge, as a function of the historical situation and structure of the group within which it originates'⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ without examining the long-term development of knowledge and its links with other processes of long term social change.⁽¹⁹¹⁾ Any given body of knowledge, suggested Elias, 'is derived from, and is a continuation of, a long process of knowledge acquisition in the past',⁽¹⁹²⁾ and can only be explained as 'part of the wider development of the societies where knowledge develops and, ultimately, of that of mankind'.⁽¹⁹³⁾ For example , Elias distanced himself from Thomas Kuhn's distinction between 'normal science' and 'scientific revolutions'. He argued that Kuhn saw the two as too sharply discontinuous from each other, neglecting the contribution that 'normal' scientific endeavour eventually makes to paradigmatic revolutions, and presenting those scientific revolutions as too arbitrary, denying their character as progressions, extensions or improvement in human knowledge.⁽¹⁹⁴⁾

All students of sociology are familiar with the debates concerning the possibility of objectivity, especially on whether an objective world can be said to exist independently of human observation and thought. However, Elias suggested that a fundamental problem with such debates is the underlying conception of the 'subject' of scientific endeavour as 'a lonely individual, an isolated "subject" fishing here and now for knowledge of the connections of "objects" in the vastness of an unknown world',⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ for it is this conception which generates the apparently irreconcilable opposition between absolute subjectivity and positivist objectivity. Instead, Elias argued 'that everybody stands on the shoulders of others from whom he has learned an already acquired fund of knowledge which he may extend if he can'.⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ We need, he thought, 'a paradigm appropriate to the experience that the acquisition of knowledge is a process which surpasses the life span and the capacity for discovery of a single individual'.⁽¹⁹⁷⁾ The development of knowledge is 'a process whose 'subjects' are groups of people, long lines of generations of men', with a fluctuating balance between people's 'long-term interest in the connections and structures of the objects of their quest for knowledge' and their 'short-term interests, feelings and needs'.⁽¹⁹⁸⁾

Scientific knowledge is produced by interdependent human beings in particular social settings, the unplanned dynamics of which display three features: (1) a 'long-term trend towards increasing specialization'; (2) 'power- and status-differentials between the various specialized disciplines'; and (3) 'the tendency of scientific establishments to develop professional ideologies' which operate with greater or lesser success to enhance the status of particular disciplines.⁽¹⁹⁹⁾ The greater the status of a particular discipline, the less inclined its members will be towards an interest in inter-disciplinarity or a responsiveness to commentary from outside the discipline. Elias argued that scientific activity should be seen as taking place within powerful processes of competition between different scientific establishments at varying levels in a hierarchically structured social network, with the level of available economic resources dependent on a discipline's position within the network. Sociology, in particular, is caught between two more powerful blocs which weaken its autonomy: first, within universities, physicists and philosophers, who respectively drive sociological research towards quantification and tend to undermine sociology's decentering of 'the subject'. Second, political party establishments which, through their control over the funding of social research, attempt to exercise control over the topics investigated by sociologists as well as the types of conclusions they come to'.⁽²⁰⁰⁾ The crux of his disagreement with Karl Popper was his perception that Popper was arguing for a single logic or method of scientific investigation applicable across all fields of intellectual endeavour, which Elias felt made no sense at all of the varieties of scientific establishments and their corresponding forms of inquiry. More than that, Elias regarded Popper's writings as a philosopher's attempt to impose the methods appropriate to a very particular perspective on only one discipline, classical physics, on all forms of scientific study.

He described scientific establishments as 'groups of people who collectively are able to exercise a monopolistic control over resources needed by others', and who both adminster a body knowledge which they have inherited from a previous generation, and control the transmission of that body of knowledge, including their advances to it, to the next generation.⁽²⁰¹⁾ The production of scientific knowledge should thus be regarded as integrally bound up in historically-specific relations of power within particular social settings, characterized by fluctuating power-ratios between the various groups of scientists and non-scientists. The more a scientific establishment can monopolize particular types of knowledge, the greater their power-ratio in relation to other social groups. This is why 'the striving for complete autonomy of one's own discipline and, if possible, for domination of other disciplines within the "groves of Academe" still outweighed by far the capacity for systematic co-operation', a dynamic which is 'not without influence on the construction of theories, the framing of problems and the character of the techniques used for solving them'.⁽²⁰²⁾

These observations form the basis of Elias's approach to exactly how knowledge develops over time, and his criteria for assessing what constitutes its development. He felt that the sociology of knowledge had focused too much on ideology at the expense of whatever might be counted as non-ideological 'knowledge' or 'science',⁽²⁰³⁾ and was concerned to identify how the knowledge available to members of any given society is both built upon and advances on previous generations' attempts to comprehend the world around them. Rather than engaging in arguments about the 'truth' or 'falsity' of knowledge, Elias thought it was more appropriate to assess the relationship of any given idea or theory with its predecessors, with specific reference to its 'object-adequacy' or 'reality-congruence, and its 'survival value'. In his words:

....what practising scientists test if they examine the results of their enquiries, both on the empirical and the theoretical level, is not whether these results are the ultimate and final truth, but whether they are an advance in relation to the existing fund of knowledge in their field. In scientific, though not in moral matters, the concept of 'truth' is an anachronism; criteria of advance, though not yet highly conceptualized, are widely used in the practice of sciences. They form a central issue in any non-relativistic sociological study and theory of knowledge.⁽²⁰⁴⁾

For Elias, scientific 'advance' has two features: first, it consists of the attainment of relative autonomy in relation to the specific human groups engaged in the production of scientific knowledge. An exemplary case for Elias was the progressive de-centering of the physical world, the development from geocentric to heliocentric, and finally to relationist conceptions of the universe. In the work of Aristotle and Ptolemy, human beings were conceived as constituting the centre of the physical universe. The work of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, in contrast, 'shows in a paradigmatic manner the crucial changeover from the dominance of a subject-centred to that of a more object-oriented orientation'.⁽²⁰⁵⁾ However, even this model is still subject-centred to the extent that it presumes a single frame of reference for the entire universe, whereas Einstein's theory of relativity allows for an infinite number of frames of reference, putting forward 'a model of a universe without an absolute center'.⁽²⁰⁶⁾

Second, Elias explained the basis of greater or lesser 'object-adequacy' in terms of an opposition between what he called 'involvement' and 'detachment', and he used the example of Edgar Allan Poe's story of two fishermen caught in a maelstrom to illustrate his argument. In the story the elder brother was so overcome by the immediacy of the situation and his direct emotional response, his 'involvement', that he was unable to formulate any course of action to avoid his fate. The younger brother, on the other hand, was able to exercise greater self-control and develop some detachment from his terror, observing how the maelstrom actually worked, in particular that cylindrical objects descended more slowly, as did smaller objects. Tying himself to a cask, he jumped out of the boat, failing to persuade his brother to do the same. The elder brother in the larger object, the boat, was dragged under, while the younger managed to stay on the water's surface until the maelstrom subsided. This does not mean that a cool head is always what a situation demands, and Elias commented that there will be times when 'force, skill courage and a hot temper may be...of greater value than a high capacity for sustained self-control', although he could not help adding 'even though a bit of reflection may still help'.⁽²⁰⁷⁾ The point is a more complex one that particular situations will demand particular balances of involvement and detachment, and we can judge the adequacy of our conceptions by the effects they have - in the case of the fishermen, whether one goes under or not.

In general Elias believed that we can see a long-term development from magical or mythical ideas about the natural and human world dominated by human desires and emotions, to conceptions which achieve more detachment from our direct emotional responses and which are more 'reality-adequate'. Often Elias seemed to have a pragmatist conception of what constitutes 'reality-adequacy', suggesting that this developmental process is to a large extent determined by the role played by knowledge in power-struggles between human groups and its 'survival value'. He argued that 'one of the reasons for the long-term progress of knowledge throughout the ages....is the recurrence of advantages which at any given time specific societies derive in their unceasing conflicts with others from specific advances in knowledge which they make or use...[which] have in some case made all the difference between victory and defeat, dominance and subjection in the struggles human groups'.⁽²⁰⁸⁾

Despite Elias's argument that scientific knowledge is distinguished from ideology by its degree of relative autonomy and detachment, he also believed that scientists can never achieve absolute autonomy from their social location, and there will always be a balance between involvement and detachment. Scientific thought is always located within particular social relations and bound up in specific processes of social development, which means that 'no type of knowledge can ever be in its structure and development totally autonomous in relation to the structure of the groups who use and produce it', it can only be 'independent of it in a higher or lower degree.⁽²⁰⁹⁾ In the first of Elias's articles on the sociology of knowledge, he began the piece with a passage from Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, where a character responds to the question, 'Are you not prejudiced?' as follows: 'Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keep his mind more open. But cannot that be because one part of our mind, that which we act with, becomes prejudiced through experience, and still we keep another part completely open to observe and judge with?'⁽²¹⁰⁾ For Elias, all scientific endeavour is characterized by this permanent tension between the reality of 'prejudice', what many sociologists refer to as the socially constructed nature of all knowledge, and the possibility of a responsiveness to the observation and analysis of an ever-changing surrounding world, a balance between 'involvement' and 'detachment'.

Established and Outsiders
Another important extension of Elias's process sociology emerged from the attention he paid to the investigation of community relations. In a study of a community south of Leicester - referred to as 'Winston Parva' - undertaken together with John Scotson in the early 1960s, Elias developed a model for social relations within and between communities which revolved around the concept of relations between 'established' and 'outsider' groups. Elias preferred the contrast between established and outsiders to Marxist conceptualizations of class relations, because it seemed to capture more comprehensively the reality of day-to-day power relations and interdependencies within communities. Elias regarded communities as particularly important types of figurations which structure many of the interdependencies between human beings, in ways which develop and change along with developments in the surrounding social structure. Of particular importance was the fact that the historical development of community relations pointed to a crucial contradiction within civilizing processes: as nation-states became more socially differentiated and more of the functions of communities were assumed by larger-scale social units, especially the state, the result was a partial disintegration within community life. Elias observed an increasing 'defunctionalization' of community life, 'until all that is left from the wide range of binding functions of communities in less differentiated societies are a community's functions for the private lives of those who form it',⁽²¹¹⁾ which he saw as 'an illuminating example of the dialectic character of the development of societies'.⁽²¹²⁾

Elias defined a community as 'a group of households situated in the same locality and linked to each other by functional interdependencies which are closer than interdependencies of the same kind with other groups of people within the wider social field to which a community belongs'.⁽²¹³⁾ His study of Winston Parva and the relations between three different communities - a middle-class, a respectable working class, and a more recently arrived working class community - suggested a theory of group relations and of the mechanics of authority and stigma which Elias felt could be applied to a variety of social contexts. The relations between the older, 'established' working class community - the 'Village' - and the more recent 'outsider' working class group - the 'Estate' - was of particular significance. There were no differences between them in terms of class, religion, ethnicity or education. The major distinction related to the length of time spent in Winston Parva: 'one was a group of old residents established in the neighbourhood for two or three generations and the other was a group of newcomers'.⁽²¹⁴⁾ The two groups displayed different degrees of social cohesion and integration, and a particular ideological construction of the relative status and worth of each group. Elias noted that there was a similarity to 'the pattern of stigmatisation used by high power groups in relation to their outsider groups all over the world....in spite of all the cultural differences',⁽²¹⁵⁾ and he argued that the dynamics of established-outsider relations had the following characteristics.

First, the status distinctions between established and outsider groups are rooted in an uneven balance of power between them.⁽²¹⁶⁾ 'Without their power,' suggested Elias about established group, 'the claim to a higher status and a specific charisma would soon decay and sound hollow whatever the distinctiveness of their behaviour'.⁽²¹⁷⁾ Second, group power differentials generate a polar contrast between group charisma and group stigma and a particular 'socio-dynamics of stigmatisation'.⁽²¹⁸⁾ Although both groups may display a similar range of behaviour, the established group's greater social cohesion and control over flows of communication enables it to organize its public image in terms of its 'best' members, and to construct the identity of the outsiders in terms of its 'worst' members. In Winston Parva, for example, the Village organized its image of itself around a middle-class minority, while a minority of less respectable individuals and families in the Estate was perceived as representative of their basic identity.

Third, it is difficult for members of the outsider group to resist internalising the negative characteristics attributed to it by the established. In Elias's words:

As the established are usually more highly integrated and, in general, more powerful, they....can often impose on newcomers the belief that they are not only inferior in power but inferior by "nature" to the established group. And this internalisation by the socially inferior group of the disparaging belief of the superior group as part of their own conscience and self-image powerfully reinforces the superiority and the rule of the established group.⁽²¹⁹⁾

Members of outsider group 'emotionally experience their power inferiority as a sign of human inferiority',⁽²²⁰⁾ and incorporate the stigmatising judgements of the established group into their own personality structure.

Fourth, the shared history of the established group formed the basis of a relatively strong collective' 'we' identity as the 'Village', which was a crucial element in the power relationship with the outsider group. The established group had developed 'a stock of common memories, attachments and dislikes'.⁽²²¹⁾ There was also a more cohesive network of kinship ties between both established groups, with very few kinship ties between the Estate and the Village, increasing the isolation of Estate families. These two factors underlay the Village's social cohesion and their ability to manage the form taken by gossip. Elias considered the role of gossip as a means of collective social control to be crucial in the construction and maintenance of community identity, as well as in the management of power relations between established and outsider group. Members of the established group organized their social relations around a supportive form of gossip which Elias and Scotson referred to as 'praise gossip', reinforcing their social cohesion, and using what they called 'blame gossip' to sanction deviant members. The gossip relating to outsiders, on the other hand, was based primarily on 'blame gossip', encouraging the stigmatising views of outsiders, among both the established and outsiders themselves.

The established regarded themselves as superior to a large extent because of their 'oldness', although this conception had little to do with the actual length of time a group and its predecessors had spent in the region. The housing in the 'Estate' had been built in 1930s, and began to take shape during World War II as families evacuated from London, and people continued to migrate from London after the war's end. But even twenty years later, when Elias and Scotson undertook their study, 'the older residents of the "village" still spoke of people from the Estate as "foreigners", saying that they "couldn't understand a word they say". A local newspaper reporter could still remark: "Of course, they're Londoners, you've got to remember that, with different ways, so that they are different to the older people around here"'.⁽²²²⁾ Indeed, it is the shared identity of the established group and the perception that this group identity may be threatened by newcomers which sets the whole mechanism of established-outsider relations in motion in the first place. Elias and Scotson spoke of the 'wholesale rejection' of newcomers by the Villagers producing the social isolation of the Estate which in turn undermined its social cohesion.

Finally, an important linkage between Elias's theory of established-outsider relations and his theory of civilizing processes was the observation that the established almost invariably experience and present themselves as more 'civilized', and outsiders are constructed as more 'barbaric'. Among working-class communities the distinction generally takes the form of one between the 'respectable' or 'decent' and the 'rough'. Respectability was associated with 'a more articulate code of behaviour,' 'a higher degree of self-restraint', ' a higher degree of orderliness, circumspection, foresight and group cohesion', all of which offer 'status- and power-rewards in compensation for the frustration of restraints and the relative loss of spontaneity'.⁽²²³⁾ The distinction between respectability and roughness was organized around a number of perceived differences in behaviour between the Village and the Estate - referred to by Villagers as 'Rat Alley'. Estate members were seen as less restrained in their leisure time, more boisterous in their local pub and inclined to drink more than they 'should' and use 'coarse' language, more inclined to fight among each other, less restrained in their sexual conduct, inclined to delinquency and crime, exercised little control over their children, and, above all, 'dirty'. In fact, Elias and Scotson found that 'one could visit a good number of people on the Estate in their houses and find that neither the standards of cleanliness nor those of conduct were noticeably different' from those in the Village.⁽²²⁴⁾ But the concentration of attention on a minority of incidents and 'rough' families on the Estate enabled the Villagers to construct a picture of the Estate as 'a kind of slum inhabited by uncouth people who lived with hordes of uncontrollable children noisily in neglected houses'.⁽²²⁵⁾ A typical remark made by a Village member was that 'most of the residents on the Estate are foreigners and criminals',⁽²²⁶⁾ and this type of merging of categories - criminal, black, working class, homosexual, violent, foreign, mentally ill - which in reality have little or nothing to do with each other, is a characteristic mechanism of constructing group stigma, presenting one's own established group as the bearer of human civilization itself, and the contrasting outsiders as containing all that threatens to undermine civilization.

The more general significance of the study was that Elias regarded the power relations he encountered in Winston Parva as particular examples of a model or 'empirical paradigm' of established-outsider figurations which can be found in numerous other settings and on larger scales, even if they may develop in different ways. In his words:

What one observed in the "village" was only a moderate small-scale example of a pattern which one can observe, often in a much more tense and virulent form, in the relation of many old established groups, nations, classes, ethnic minorities or whatever their form may be, to their outsider groups.....Everywhere group charisma attributed to oneself and group disgrace attributed to outsiders are complementary phenomena.⁽²²⁷⁾

He thus saw the development of an established-outsider distinction, and the dynamics of stigmatisation which accompanies it, as built into the processes of group formation; the attachment of negative characteristics to an outsider group can be regarded as simply the other side of the positive self-evaluation of the members of any established group. The emergence of feelings of inferiority among the outsider group was also a useful clue to the effects of all power inequalities on those in subordinate positions.⁽²²⁸⁾

What this means is that a considerable amount of social conflict can be explained in terms of established-outsider dynamics. Elias argued that racism, for example, should not be approached in terms of the supposed differences between racial or ethnic groups, but in terms of 'the fact that one is an established group, with superior power resources, and the other is an outsider group, greatly inferior in terms of its power ratio, against which the established group can close ranks. What one calls "race relations", in other words, are simply established-outsider relations of a particular type'.⁽²²⁹⁾ Equally important was his observation that established-outsider dynamics operate, on the whole, outside the conscious control of the participants, so that in the case of Winston Parva 'the whole drama was played out by the two sides as if they were puppets on a string'.⁽²³⁰⁾ However, Elias hoped that by better understanding the 'compelling forces' operating in established-outsider figurations, we might 'in time be able to devise practical measures capable of controlling them'.⁽²³¹⁾

CRITIQUES
There are a variety of criticisms of Elias's work, and I will not be able to do justice to all of them here.⁽²³²⁾ The ones I will be concentrating are those dealing with his understanding of processes of civilization, and they can be roughly grouped as follows: (1) the question of continuity versus change, or has there been the degree and kind of transformation in human conduct that Elias argues for? (2) the issue of contradictions and conflicts within civilizing processes, and the question of 'civilized barbarism'; (3) Elias's stress on the unplanned character of civilizing processes, and the possibility that intentional, deliberate action has been neglected. Should we speak of civilizing processes or civilizing offensives?

The most vigorous of Elias's critics has undoubtedly been the German ethnologist, Hans-Peter Duerr, who has written a series of books under the general title On the Myth of the Civilizing Process, although to date none have been translated into English. Duerr's overall concern is that although Elias set out to analyse the self-perception of Western Europeans' civilized nature and demonstrate the social conditions underlying 'civilization', he ended up taking on that self-perception largely as his own, and actually believed that human conduct has become considerably more civilized. Moreover, argues Duerr, what placed the ideas of Elias and his followers in close proximity to a colonial ideology was the apparent attribution of the technical and military dominance of Western Europe over much of the rest of the world to 'a superiority in the modelling of drive structure'.⁽²³³⁾

Duerr suggests that there is far more which we have in common both with our historical predecessors and with other cultures than Elias's perspective admits, and works to identify those similarities in human conduct. With respect to our relations to our bodies, for example, Duerr argued that:

...those who today laugh at a myth like that of Genesis have themselves done nothing other than mythologise history, and that this 'myth of the civilizing process' obscures the fact that, in all probability, in the last 40,000 years there have been neither wild nor primitive peoples, neither uncivilized nor natural peoples....and it is part of the essence of humans to be ashamed of their nakedness, however this nakedness may be defined historically.⁽²³⁴⁾

One central focus of Duerr's analysis then, is to draw attention to those features of human relations in all cultural and historical contexts which produce roughly similar forms of behaviour. For example, if we agree that human sexual relations are always socially regulated and subjected to some patterned set of rules and norms, then this will universally produce some sort of division between public and private bodily domains, with the private domain constituting the focus of social regulation. For Duerr the kind of lack of restraint of sexual impulses which Elias seems to observe in the Middle Ages is simply impossible, because the patterned family relations which existed at the time required at least some set of rules governing what one could or could not do in the sexual realm, and Duerr gathers a range of historical evidence in support this point, as well as ethnographic data to reinforce it for the cross-cultural dimensions of the argument.

Elias did maintain that he was only pointing to relative differences in self-restraint, that sexuality and violence was simply less restrained, and that there is no 'zero point' to civilizing processes, no culture or historical period where humans beings are not subjected to some form of social regulation. However, for Duerr this is a central inconsistency in Elias's work, since his portrayal of medieval social life often made it look almost totally unrestrained and free of any social regulation. Duerr draws attention to a number of passages in The Civilizing Process where Elias seemed to be saying, not that sexuality was less removed from public view, but not removed behind the scenes at all.⁽²³⁵⁾ Despite Elias's protestations to the contrary, the way The Civilizing Process was written often gave the impression that the Middle Ages were understood as the beginning of a process of civilization, rather than seeing medieval social relations and conduct as themselves the outcome of particular processes of social change. Franz Borkeneau made a similar point in his review of the book,⁽²³⁶⁾ and more recently Arnason has also suggested that the violence which dominated life in the early Middle Ages should be seen as the outcome of a specific interaction between the declining Roman Empire and the surrounding regions, 'not simply the normal condition of a society which lacks both a complex division of labour and a centralized monopoly of violence'.⁽²³⁷⁾

Much of Duerr's argument is organized around the overlap between two different types of argument in The Civilizing Process. On the one hand, Elias was arguing that the nature of the restraint exercised over our bodies and psychic dispositions changed in form, from being based on external, social agencies, to being located far more within ourselves as self-restraint. On the other hand, he also suggested that in this movement from external to self-restraint, the restraint itself became more effective, that individual impulses and desires became more effectively subordinated to the requirements of ever more complex and differentiated social relations characterized by lengthened chains of social interdependency. These two lines of argument are not necessarily the same: the first change could take place with little corresponding change in the effectivity of psychological restraint, and similarly the second change could occur with little accompanying change in the way psychological restraint is exercised. Duerr is particularly interested in the former possibility: that although there has clearly been a historical change in the way in which social and self-control operate, this does not mean that the further one goes back in time, the less controlled and restrained people have been.

On the contrary, Duerr argues that since 'the people in small, easy to survey 'traditional' societies were far more closely interwoven with the members of their own group than is the case with us today,' this means that 'the direct social control to which people were subjected was more unavoidable and air-tight'.⁽²³⁸⁾ Whereas for Elias the lengthening chains of interdependence characterizing industrializing and urbanizing societies can result only in the demand for greater foresight and self-restraint, Duerr suggests that 'associating with many other people also means...a lack of 'bindedness' and thus a relational freedom'.⁽²³⁹⁾ Being bound to larger number of people thus means that breaches of norms and social deviance are 'less consequential; the person concerned does not lose the face, but one of their faces'.⁽²⁴⁰⁾ Duerr agrees that urbanization and the decline of feudal economic relations had made traditional forms of social control far less effective, and that the forms of social control which emerged from around the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were more effective than the older ones in some respects. However, in other senses, 'a certain degree of porosity also arose, which was unknown to the forms of social control in 'archaic' times and which gave people opportunities for freedom which they had never had before'.⁽²⁴¹⁾

Elias's own argument about the historical emergence of the homo clausus conception of human psychology in the course of the civilizing process can be summoned in support of Duerr here. As the distinction between the private, individual, psychological realm and the social realm intensifies, social norms can be experienced less and less as integral to one's identity, as 'external', and thus less thoroughly observed. Indeed, Elias's later comments on how the particularly German separation of the requirements of private conscience from those of social rules led to a willingness to engage in socially-sanctioned barbarism reinforce the significance of this point still further. In other words, the historical emergence of more sophisticated forms of self-control alongside, or at times instead of, forms of external, social control, does not in itself guarantee an isomorphism between them, which is what Elias seems to have assumed in The Civilizing Process, and then recognized as false in his examination of the Nazi regime in The Germans. This is why Elias moved from concentrating exclusively on the civilizing process to include an analysis of processes of both civilization and decivilization.

Duerr is extremely sceptical about the idea that our habitus and emotional economy is linked to greater social differentiation and lengthening chains of interdependence in the way that Elias supposes. Medieval villages and members of tribal societies are, for Duerr, subjected to considerably more restraint than inhabitants of a modern industrial city. They were all 'bound up in a much more intimate way in finely meshed social webs, integrated into consanguine and affinitive kinship groups, alliance systems, age, sex, occupational and neighbourhood groups, secret and warrior societies than people in modern societies'.⁽²⁴²⁾ Duerr argues that individuals were 'subjected to an essentially more effective and inexorable social control than today'.⁽²⁴³⁾ This does not mean that in specific historical contexts there may not appear situations of relative behavioural freedom, but Duerr attributes this to the transition process between one type of social regulation and another, from the 'village eye' to the self-constraint of urban industrial societies. For Duerr, the intensification of self-control is less a product of any increased demands on individuals of more socially differentiated societies, and more the form of social regulation suited to social relations where one encounters a larger variety of 'interaction partners' from diverse social and cultural backgrounds.

A similar scepticism about the extent to which personality structure or habitus changes in the course of history was expressed by Reinhard Bendix,⁽²⁴⁴⁾ who advanced the proposition that we should distinguish between what Oscar Lewis called the 'public' or 'social' personality characterizing a particular society or historical period, and the personality structures of the individuals making up that society or period. He only made one direct reference to Elias, with most of his attention focused on Erich Fromm, but the central arguments relate equally to Elias. Bendix argued that there was no essential congruity between prevailing social institutions and cultural forms on the one hand, and 'the psychological habitus of a people' on the other, and that people may behave in particular ways 'in spite of as well as because of, their psychological disposition', for a range of reasons including fear and apathy.⁽²⁴⁵⁾ Bendix maintained that we must avoid the idea that people act as they desire to act, and that 'we must guard carefully against the fallacy of attributing to character structure what may be a part of the social environment'.⁽²⁴⁶⁾ In relation to Elias, Bendix commented that he seemed to think that the same individuals moved from being physically aggressive to being self-restrained, when Bendix felt it was more likely that people 'tried to act as they had to act, without desiring it and without being too good at it either'⁽²⁴⁷⁾. Rather than seeing habitus as undergoing any significant process of change, Bendix cautioned against 'the fallacy of attributing to character structure what may be part of the social environment', as well as 'the temptation of attributing to the people of another culture a psychological uniformity which we are unable to discover in our own'.⁽²⁴⁸⁾

In response to these criticisms, one could argue that Elias has the majority of historical social scientists on his side; if he was wrong about a development in personality structure, then so were Weber, Simmel, Horkheimer, Mannheim, Foucault, and just about every scholar who has turned their attention to the question. As David Garland summed up the issue recently, there seems to be 'a substantial body of historical evidence which would support the contention that something very like a civilizing process has indeed taken place, bringing about changes in sensibility and ultimately changes in social practice'.⁽²⁴⁹⁾ Both Duerr and Bendix would say that this is precisely their point, that a certain orthodoxy has developed in the way we perceive European history which actually has the power of a mythology, persisting as an element of the structure of our thinking despite evidence to the contrary. It is no accident that Bendix also wrote perhaps the most thorough critique of the very notion of a distinction between tradition and modernity,⁽²⁵⁰⁾ and although Elias improves on most analyses by posing a continuous process of development rather than distinct historical periods, the problem remains of whether human psychology today is so different from that of earlier historical periods.

There are two areas in Elias's own work which provide a point of linkage with Bendix and Duerr's critiques, and they may point to a way past the conflict of perspectives. First, there is the inconsistency discussed earlier about how durable habitus actually is in relation to social conditions, and whether a changed social context would rapidly produce a different habitus. The second is his inconsistency about the degree of correspondence between habitus and social relations. In most of his work he clearly assumed a functional correspondence between the requirements of a set of social conditions and the habitus developed within people from childhood onwards, but at some points he posited a theory of possible 'lag' between social conditions and habitus, with social changes often moving faster and further than psychological structure.⁽²⁵¹⁾

The second area of criticism concerns Elias's neglect of the possibility of simultaneous but contradictory social processes. Until he started analysing processes of decivilization, it was fair to say that he neglected the 'dark' side of civilisation, and his inclination towards elegant simplicity made it difficult to see the dialectical nature of civilisation and the possibility of different, perhaps opposing, processes developing at different levels of any given social figuration. Breuer,⁽²⁵²⁾ for example, draws attention to the 'negative side of functional differentiation', the effects of the organisation of capitalist societies around the logic of the market. In remarking on the influence of Islamic culture and society on medieval Europe, Arnason also suggests that it should be seen less as a figuration of states than as 'a system of markets, monetary movements, and urban communities'.⁽²⁵³⁾ Although longer chains of interdependence may demand greater foresight and calculation as Elias suggests, markets also display 'a dimension of coincidence and anarchy, which undermines the calculability of individual action'.⁽²⁵⁴⁾ Market societies thus disintegrate and decompose social relations at the same time that they promote social integration and aggregation. Competition does not simply produce ever-larger and better integrated 'survival units', argues Breuer, it also generates 'the atomization of the social, the increasing density and negation of all ties - asocial sociability'.⁽²⁵⁵⁾ In some senses Elias responds to this criticism in his later writings with his theory of decivilization, but for Breuer this also fails to meet his objections, because he believes that Elias still sees processes of decivilization as distinct from civilizing processes. Following Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the 'dialectic of enlightenment' Breuer suggests a more dialectical conception of civilization as itself producing its own dark side, of civilization and decivilization as different sides of the same coin, always developing hand in hand.⁽²⁵⁶⁾

Third, although Elias did explicitly argue that we should analyse the interweaving of intentional action with unplanned social processes, in the substance of his analyses he laid far greater stress on the unplanned character of social change. A number of commentators, such as Haferkamp, Arnason and Chartier, argue that the result is a relative neglect of the organizing interventions of powerful social groups into the form and direction of civilizing processes. Elias's understanding of European history, suggests Arnason, 'seems to leave no place for a relatively autonomous, let alone a "pace-setting" development of world views'.⁽²⁵⁷⁾

Haferkamp also argues that Elias did not 'give much weight to the success of intentions and plans,' nor did he 'check to see when the planning of associations of action has been successful'.⁽²⁵⁸⁾ When Chartier speaks of self-discipline and emotional management as having been 'instituted' by the state,⁽²⁵⁹⁾ he is actually using a logic which is very different from Elias's in The Civilizing Process, where the emphasis is placed on the requirements of particular types of social figuration. Most social historians also paint a picture of European history where particular groups of lawyers, inquisitors, clergy, judges, entrepreneurs and so on played an active, constitutive role in shaping history, rather than merely reflecting their social context. The argument can be summarized as revolving around whether we should speak of civilizing processes or civilizing offensives.⁽²⁶⁰⁾ Elias himself recognized the issue when he said of processes of technological change that 'there are people who bring about the technization of certain aspects of their social life, use it, and, in turn, are themselves stamped by this process,' and that 'the civilizing process is a process of human beings civilizing human beings'.⁽²⁶¹⁾ The difficulty is that this runs contrary to the perspective which runs through the majority of his writings.

The major conclusions we can draw from these and other criticisms are, first, that there seems to be a need for a more dialectical understanding of social relations and historical development, one which grasps the often contradictory character of social and psychic life. This applies both in relation to social relations and the conflicting consequences of state societies organized around the logic of the market, as well as in relation to psychic processes and the contradictory dynamics between our affects, desires and impulses and the requirements of social relationships. Elias himself moved in this direction in his later writings, and the issue can be seen as one of 'reading back' this conceptual shift into his earlier writings. This issue is particularly significant in coming to an adequate understanding of 'civilized barbarism', of how it is possible for dehumanizing violence to continue at both an individual and collective level at the very same time that we appear to be becoming increasingly civilized. An important question, then, is the extent to which civilization in Elias's sense actually generates barbaric conduct, rather than simply being its opposite.

Second, Elias's concentration on state-formation and social differentiation in his earlier writings appears to require modification, to take account both of alternative aspects of social organization which can have almost identical civilizing effects, and of the diverse, often barbaric effects of state-formation, indeed the brutality lying at the heart of almost every nation-state. This is particularly significant in relation to developing a less linear view of European history, to the ways in which we approach non-Western societies, and the relations between civilizations and cultures across the globe. An important area of research will thus be working through many of these arguments in relation to parts of the world other than Europe. For example, it is debatable how well Elias's analysis works even for the United States, with its weaker centralisation of authority and a state with a much shakier hold of the monopoly of the means of violence. The way in which one might analyse civilizing processes outside Western Europe remains a badly under examined area of study. Central here is the question of colonialism and imperialism, the ways in which nation-states have established a brutal and violent relationship between their own 'civilization' and the supposedly 'barbaric' cultures of subjected peoples. This applies both to the ways in which Europeans dealt with their colonies, and the ways in which nation-states such as the USA, Canada and Australia based their civilization on an essentially violent and barbaric relationship with their respective indigenous peoples.

Third, the theoretical injunction to see planned, intentional action as interwoven with unplanned social processes can be explored in much greater detail in analyses of processes of civilization. Dealing with this problem will also establish much clearer linkages between Elias' work and that of social and cultural historians generally, as well as the arguments of thinkers such as Weber and Foucault.⁽²⁶²⁾

Finally, many of the criticisms appear to arise in response to Elias's persistent use of the concepts 'restraint' and 'constraint'. Elias's own theoretical position is that human habitus is socially constituted, but the notion of restraint, emanating from either outside or within an individual, implies the existence of some presocial 'nature' which requires restraining. In order to capture the social production of subjectivity, desire and emotions, we appear to need a different concept. The German word which Elias originally used is Zwang, which can also mean 'compulsion', 'coercion' or 'obligation', and these concepts probably come closer to the reality of the relations between psychic and social life. Rather than speaking of a historical transition towards increasing self-restraint, then, it would be more useful to think in terms of the relations between social and self-compulsion, or discipline, thus capturing the positive, productive aspects of the effects of social figurations on human habitus. We will return to the implications of these possible outcomes to the confrontation between Elias and his critics in the final chapter, but before that it will be useful to take a brief look at the ways in which Elias extended his process-sociological approach in relation to a number of other features of contemporary social life.

CONCLUSION
Elias laid great stress in his writings on the importance of intellectual detachment and the destructive impact of emotional, ideologically-founded involvement on our ability to deal effectively with important human problems. What can easily be overlooked, however, is how passionate an intellectual he actually was. He channelled all his energy and commitment into his research and teaching, including that which many of us put into partners and children. He wrote in a letter to Wouters:

...it is necessary for every grown up person - necessary for a person's own mental health, to find a balance between the pre-occupation with his or her own immediate needs for warmth and love and sexual gratification, for companionship and friendship on the one hand and, on the other hand, the devotion to a solid task of a less personal nature, a task for others without which no sense of personal fulfilment is possible.⁽²⁶³⁾

Although he strove for intellectual detachment, regarding self-discipline as the most secure foundation for an effective management of the problems of human existence, he did so in an extremely 'involved' way, pouring almost all of his life and soul into what he hoped would eventually become the very political task of analysing society. It is in this sense that he was one the few truly 'public intellectuals' who, in being both admired and criticised, makes a real contribution to the enrichment of human social life.

Elias himself would not have used the term 'radical', but it may be the best way to describe his approach to sociology. At a time when most sociologists turned away from history and poured scorn on the dangers of evolutionism, he insisted on placing historical analysis and a concern with directional social development at the centre of sociological thought. He maintained a linkage between sociology and other human sciences such as psychology and history while the discipline became increasingly isolated and fragmented. He mounted a powerful argument against individualism, in favour of a self-discipline which resonates with the requirements of living as part of a group, throughout a period when concepts such as 'emancipation' and 'freedom' had worked their way to the heart of social science. He argued for the importance of transcending the boundaries of nation-states and thinking of terms of 'humanity as a whole' well before social scientists started using the term 'globalization'. His conceptualization of history in terms of long-term processes challenges, arguably more effectively than any of the existing critiques, the temporal divisions which plague social science, particularly that between 'tradition' and 'modernity', subjecting the self-assessment of 'modern' itself to critical analysis. This also means that he did not accept the notion that we have entered a 'postmodern' period; indeed, he preferred to describe us today as 'late barbarians'⁽²⁶⁴⁾ living at the closing of the Middle Ages. Like Bruno Latour,⁽²⁶⁵⁾ Elias felt that 'we have never been modern', let alone become postmodern.

Right up to his death in 1990 at the age of 93, Elias thought about and practised sociology much as he lived his life, as an outsider to the establishment. Although his ideas are increasingly becoming part of mainstream sociological thought, it seems likely that he would have continued to maintain a position of radical criticism of all those established orthodoxies he felt still stood in the way of a truly human society. This does not mean we should not be critical of many aspects of his work; but whether we move with Elias, go 'beyond Elias' or identify alternative perspectives, engaging with his ideas usefully contributes to the development of more thoughtful and vigorous forms of sociological practice.

Elias's work has enormous potential to contribute to a reorientation of contemporary sociological theory. There is a powerful tendency among sociologists towards polarisation between structure and action, micro and micro approaches, between historical sociology and ahistorical studies, between rational choice theory and sociological determinism. All the features of Elias's approach - the emphasis on social relations, long-term processes, the interweaving of planned action and unplanned development, the importance of seeing humans as interdependent, the centrality of power in social relations, and the significance of the concept 'habitus' in understanding human conduct - have considerable potential for taking sociological theory beyond these dichotomies, which seem to have rather outlived their usefulness.

The overarching theme of Elias's sociology was the question of human barbarism and its relation to whatever we might wish to call civilization. Alvin Gouldner once complained about Elias's work that violence had not been eliminated in contemporary civilizations, it had simply been transformed from explicit ferocity to 'passionless, impersonal callousness, in which more persons than ever before in history are now killed or mutilated with the flick of a switch....where killing occurs without personal rancour and the massacre of nations may be ordered without a frown'.⁽²⁶⁶⁾ This was, however, exactly the point Elias was trying to address: how to understand such a development and, more importantly, to develop a sense of what it was about the way our social relations are ordered, and have developed in the long term, which may make it possible to move beyond the mere 'civilization' of barbarism to its genuine elimination. His theory of civilizing processes was above all concerned with the problem of when and how civilization takes place, an analysis of the extent to which we have come to treat each other more humanely, precisely in order to identify how we might continue such a change into the future and live with each other with neither ferocity nor callousness.

REFERENCES

1. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (CP), Oxford, Blackwell (1994) [1939], p. 204.

2. K. Marx. and F. Engels, The German Ideology, New York, International Publishers (1970) [1846], p. 122.

3. B. Maso, 'Elias and the neo-Kantians: intellectual backgrounds of The Civilizing Process', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), pp. 43-79; J. Goudsblom, 'Elias and Cassirer, sociology and philosophy' Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), pp. 121-6; R. Kilminster and C. Wouters, 'From philosophy to sociology: Elias and the neo-Kantians (a response to Benjo Maso)', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), pp. 98-133; B. Maso, 'The differential layers of The Civilizing Process: a response to Goudsblom and Kilminster and Wouters', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), p. 127-45.

4. Ibid., p. 35.

5. Ibid., p. 35.

6. I. Seglow, 'Work at a research program', in P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte (eds), Human Figurations, Amsterdam, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift (1977), p. 17.

7. in J. Goudsblom, 'Responses to Norbert Elias's work in England, Germany, the Netherlands and France', in P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte (eds), Human Figurations, Amsterdam, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift (1977), p. 78.

8. CP, p. 543.

9. W.G. Sumner, Folkways, Boston, Ginn & Company (1906).

10. W.G. Sumner, Folkways, Boston, Ginn & Company (1906), p. 3-4.

11. J. Goudsblom, De Sociologie van Norbert Elias, Amsterdam, Meulenhoff (1987), p. 45.

12. Although, a more accurate translation of the Dutch would be 'Life's ferocity' or 'vividness'.

13. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, op. cit., pp. 9-10.

14. in J. Goudsblom, 'Responses to Norbert Elias's work in England, Germany, the Netherlands and France', op. cit., p. 78.

15. N. Elias, 'Sociology of knowledge: new perspectives II', Sociology, vol. 5 (1971), p. 362.

16. RL, p. 132.

17. B. Nietsroj, 'Norbert Elias: a milestone in historical psycho-sociology. The making of the social person', Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 2 (1989), pp. 136-60.

18. RL, p. 54.

19. RL, p. 52.

20. Fuchs had to change his name to Foulkes- the English found themselves unable to resist the tempatations of coarse humour.

21. R. Brown, 'Norbert Elias in Leicester: some recollections', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 4 (1987), p. 534.

22. M. Albrow, 'Norbert Elias (1897-1990)', International Sociology, vol. 5 (1990), p. 371.

23. RL, p. 66.

24. J. Goudsblom, 'Kennismaking', in Over Elias, op. cit., p. 33.

25. N. Elias, 'Sociology and psychiatry', in S.H. Foulkes and G.S. Prince (eds), Psychiatry in a Changing Society, London, Tavistock (1969), pp. 117-44.

26. N. Wilterdink, 'Mijn slechter ik', in H. Israëls, M. Komen and A. de Swaan (eds), Over Elias, Amsterdam, Het Spinhuis (1993), p. 2.

27. H.P. Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp (1988).

28. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (CP), Oxford, Blackwell (1994) [1939], p. 41.

29. Ibid., p. 41.

30. in D. Schöttker, 'Norbert Elias und Walter Benjamin. Ein unbekannter briefwechsel und sein Zusammenhang', Merkur, vol. 42, no. 7 (1988), p. 94.

31. Ibid.

32. CP, p. 249.

33. Ibid., p. 49.

34. Ibid., p. 48.

35. Ibid., p. 44.

36. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, London, Arnold (1924).

37. CP, p. 50.

38. Ibid., p. 87.

39. Ibid., p. 99.

40. Ibid., pp. 120-1, Elias's italics.

41. Ibid., p. 47.

42. Ibid., p 76.

43. Ibid., p. 159.

44. ' '

45. CP, p. 159.

46. Ibid., p. 159.

47. Ibid., p. 88.

48. Ibid., p. 64.

49. Ibid., p. 63.

50. Ibid., p. 95.

51. Ibid., p. 113.

52. Ibid., p. 154.

53. Ibid., p. 153.

54. Ibid., p. 153.

55. Ibid., p. 153.

56. Ibid., p. 154.

57. Ibid., p. 288.

58. Ibid., p. 269.

59. Ibid., p. 457.

60. Ibid., p. 343.

61. Ibid., p. 347.

62. Ibid., p. 347.

63. Ibid., p. 397.

64. Ibid., p. 397.

65. Ibid., p. 348.

66. Ibid., p. 476.

67. Ibid., p. 447; translation modified.

68. Ibid., p. 450.

69. Ibid., p. 448.

70. Ibid., p. 452.

71. Ibid., p. 445.

72. Ibid., p. 445.

73. Ibid., p. 456.

74. Ibid., p. 395.

75. Ibid., p. 452.

76. Ibid., p. 453.

77. Ibid., pp. 445-6.

78. N. Elias, Time, Oxford, Blackwell (1992), p. 34.

79. see also E.P. Thompson, 'Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism', Past & Present, vol. 38 (1967), pp. 56-97.

80. CP, p. 458.

81. Ibid., p. 458.

82. Ibid., p. 131.

83. Ibid., p. 48.

84. Ibid., p. 524.

85. N. Elias, The Germans (TG), Cambridge: Polity (1996), p. 173.

86. Ibid., p. 175.

87. C. Wouters, 'Informalization and the civilising process', in P. Gleichman, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte (eds), Human Figurations, Amsterdam, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift (1977), p. 448.

88. N. Elias, 'Soziale Prozesse', in B. Schäfers (ed.), Grundbegriffe der Soziologie, Opladen, Leske en Budrich (1986), p. 235.

89. TG, p. 308.

90. S. Breuer, 'The denouements of civilization: Elias and modernity', International Social Science Journal, no. 128 (1991), pp. 405-6.

91. CP, p. 115.

92. C. Wouters, 'Informalization and the civilising process', op. cit.

93. TG, p. 37.

94. Ibid., p. 25.

95. M. Foucault, 'Governmentality', Ideology & Consciousness, vol. 6 (1979), pp. 5-21; G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf (1991).

96. K. Mannheim, 'The problem of generations' [1928], Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, New York, Oxford University Press (1952), pp. 276-322.

97. TG, p. 242.

98. Ibid., pp. 243-4.

99. Ibid., p. 243.

100. Ibid., p. 247.

101. Ibid., p. 198

102. Ibid., p. 261.

103. Ibid., pp. 253-4.

104. Ibid., p. 261.

105. Ibid., pp. 444-5.

106. Ibid., p. 31.

107. Ibid., p. 445.

108. N. Elias, Reflections on a Life (RL), Cambridge, Polity (1994) [1987], p. 131.

109. N. Elias, 'Sociology and psychiatry', in S.H. Foulkes and G.S.Prince (eds), Psychiatry in a Changing Society, London, Tavistock (1969), p. 127.

110. N. Elias, What is Sociology? (WiS), London, Hutchinson (1978) [1970], p. 76.

111. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (CP), Oxford, Blackwell (1994) [1939], pp. 443-4.

112. N. Elias, 'On the sociogenesis of sociology', Sociologisch Tijdschrift, vol. 11 (1984), p. 43.

113. SI, p. 62.

114. SI, p. 50.

115. CP, p. 266.

116. SI, p. 48.

117. Ibid., p. 54.

118. Ibid., p. 49.

119. Ibid., p. 49.

120. Ibid., pp. 49-50.

121. WiS, p. 58.

122. N. Elias, 'Towards a theory of social processes', op. cit., p [14].

123. N. Elias, 'Technization and civilization' [1986], Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), p. 26; 'Towards a theory of social processes', British Journal of Sociology, (forthcoming), p. 13.

124. N. Elias, 'Sociology and psychiatry', op. cit., p. 143.

125. CP, p. 213-4.

126. WiS, p. 134.

127. CP, p. 214.

128. Ibid., p. 214.

129. WiS, p. 103.

130. N. Elias, The Court Society (CS), New York, Pantheon (1983) [1969], p. 213.

131. Ibid., p. 141.

132. WiS, p. 131.

133. N. Elias, Involvement and Detachment (ID), Oxford, Basil Blackwell (1987), p. 85.

134. CS, p. 208.

135. SI, p 16.

136. CP, p. 214.

137. Ibid., p. 214.

138. CS, p. 142.

139. Ibid., p. 27.

140. D. Lockwood, 'Social integration and system integration', in G.K. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds), Explorations in Social Change, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1964), p. 245.

141. N. Mouzelis, 'On figurational sociology', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 10 (1993), p. 252.

142. SI, p. 182.

143. Ibid., p. 182.

144. CP, pp. 113, 446.

145. Ibid., pp. 454-5.

146. Ibid., p. 455.

147. SI, p. 36.

148. N. Elias, 'The civilizing of parents', in J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell (eds), The Norbert Elias Reader, Oxford, Blackwell (1997), p. [8].

149. Ibid., p. 249.

150. Ibid., p. 156.

151. SI, p. 211.

152. N. Elias, 'Technization and civilization', op. cit., p. 35; also SI, pp. 211, 214, 217.

153. e.g. P. Berger & T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Harmondsworth, Penguin (1971) [1967].

154. SI, p. 19.

155. CP, p. 480.

156. SI, p. 33.

157. Ibid., p. 37.

158. P. Bourdieu, In Other Words, Cambridge, Polity (1990), p. 192.

159. Ibid., p. 192.

160. WiS, p. 75.

161. N. Elias, 'Knowledge and power: an interview by Peter Ludes', in N. Stehr and V. Meja (eds), Society and Knowledge, London, Transaction (1984), p. 251.

162. WiS, p. 74.

163. CS, p. 145.

164. Ibid., p. 144.

165. Ibid, p. 265.

166. Ibid, p. 265.

167. N. Elias, 'The civilizing of parents', op. cit.,p. [5].

168. A. Rijnen, 'Wat zou hij er van zeggen?' in H. Israëls, M. Komen and A. de Swaan (eds), Over Elias, Amsterdam, Het Spinhuis (1993), pp. 92-3.

169. N. Elias, 'Sociology and psychiatry', op. cit., p. 143.

170. CS, p. 143.

171. N. Elias, 'Sociology and psychiatry', op. cit., p. 143.

172. J. Goudsblom, Sociology in the Balance, Oxford, Basil Blackwell (1977) [1973], p. 149.

173. N. Elias, 'Towards a theory of social processes', op. cit., p. [14].

174. K. Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1940), p. 16.

175. CP, p. 200.

176. ID, p. xvi.

177. N. Elias, 'Processes of state formation and nation building', op. cit., pp. 274-84.

178. WiS, p. 112.

179. N. Elias, 'Soziale Prozesse', in B. Schäfers (ed.), Grundbegriffe der Soziologie, Opladen, Leske en Budrich (1986), p. 234.

180. WiS, p. 118.

181. Ibid.,p. 118.

182. CP, p. 48.

183. CP, p. 182.

184. P. Burke, History and Social Theory, Cambridge, Polity (1992), p. 149.

185. N. Elias, 'Towards a theory of social processes', op. cit., p. ??.

186. WiS, p. 161.

187. N. Elias, 'Towards a theory of social processes', op. cit., p. [3].

188. N. Elias, 'Soziale Prozesse', op. cit., p. 235.

189. N. Elias, 'Sociology of knowledge: new perspectives', Sociology vol. 5 (1971), p. 155.

190. Ibid., p. 158.

191. Ibid., p. 161.

192. Ibid., p. 158

193. Ibid., p. 159.

194. Ibid., p. 168.

195. Ibid., p. 165.

196. Ibid., p. 165.

197. Ibid., p. 165.

198. Ibid., pp. 165-6.

199. N. Elias, 'Scientific establishments', in N. Elias and R. Whitley and H.G. Martins (eds), Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, Dordrecht, Reidel (1982), p. 26

200. Ibid., pp. 54-6.

201. Ibid., p. 40.

202. Ibid., pp. 44-5.

203. N. Elias, 'Sociology of knowledge: new perspectives', op. cit., pp. 161-2.

204. Ibid., p. 358.

205. Ibid., p. 359.

206. Ibid., p. 360.

207. N. Elias, Involvement and Detachment (ID), Oxford, Blackwell (1987), p. 47.

208. N. Elias, 'Sociology of knowledge: new perspectives', op. cit., p. 160.

209. Ibid., p. 365.

210. N. Elias, 'Problems of involvement and detachment' British Journal of Sociology, vol. 7 (1956), p. 226.

211. N. Elias, 'Towards a theory of communities', in C. Bell and H. Newby (eds), The Sociology of Community, London, Frank Cass (1974), p. xxix.

212. Ibid., p. xxxiii.

213. Ibid., p. xix.

214. N. Elias & J.L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, London, Frank Cass (1965), pp. xxi-xxii.

215. Ibid., p. xxvi.

216. Ibid., p. xx.

217. Ibid., p. 155.

218. Ibid., p. xix.

219. Ibid., p. 159.

220. Ibid., p. xxvi.

221. Ibid., p. xxxviii.

222. Ibid., p. 19.

223. Ibid., p. 153.

224. Ibid., p. 81.

225. Ibid., p. 81.

226. Ibid., p. 88.

227. Ibid., p. 104.

228. Ibid., p. xxvi.

229. Ibid., p. xxx.

230. Ibid., p. lii.

231. Ibid., p. 173.

232. see also S. Mennell, Norbert Elias; An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell (1992): 227-50; R. van Krieken, 'Violence, self-discipline and modernity: beyond the "civilizing process"', Sociological Review, vol. 37 (1989), pp. 193-218.

233. H.P. Duerr, Obszönität und Gewalt, op. cit., p. 12.

234. H.P. Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham, op. cit., p. 12.

235. H.P. Duerr, Intimität, op. cit., p. 12.

236. F. Borkeneau, 'Review of Elias I', Sociological Review, vol. 30 (1938), pp. 308-11.

237. J. Arnason, 'Civilization, culture and power: reflections on Norbert Elias' genealogy of the West', op. cit., pp. 54-5.

238. H.P. Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham, op. cit., p. 10.

239. Ibid., p. 11.

240. H.P. Duerr, Obszönität und Gewalt, op. cit., p. 28.

241. H.P. Duerr, Intimität, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp (1990), p. 24.

242. H.P. Duerr, Obszönität und Gewalt, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp (1993), p. 26-7.

243. Ibid., p. 26.

244. R. Bendix, 'Compliant behaviour and individual personality', American Journal of Sociology, vol. 58 (1952), pp. 292-303. .

245. Ibid., p. 297.

246. Ibid., 301.

247. Ibid., 302.

248. Ibid., 301.

249. D. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press (1990), p. 233.

250. R. Bendix, 'Tradition and modernity reconsidered', Comparative Studies in Society & History, vol. 9 (1967), pp. 292-346.

251. TG, p. 337; N. Elias, 'Technization and civilization' [1986], Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), pp. 30, 35.

252. S. Breuer, 'The denouements of civilization: Elias and modernity', op. cit., pp. 401-16.

253. J. Arnason, 'Civilization, culture and power: reflections on Norbert Elias' genealogy of the West', op. cit., p. 55.

254. S. Breuer, 'The denouements of civilization: Elias and modernity', op. cit., p. 405.

255. Ibid., p. 407.

256. Ibid., p. 414.

257. J. Arnason, 'Civilization, culture and power: reflections on Norbert Elias' genealogy of the West', Thesis Eleven, no. 24 (1989), p. 56.

258. H. Haferkamp, 'From the intra-state to the inter-state civilizing process?', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 4 (1987), p, 556.

259. R. Chartier, 'Introduction', in R. Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life, Vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press (1989), p. 16.

260. R. van Krieken, 'The organisation of the soul: Elias and Foucault on discipline and the self', Archives Europeénnes de Sociologie, vol. 31 (1990), pp. 353-71.

261. N. Elias, 'Technization and civilization' [1986], Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12 (1995), p. 19.

262. R. van Krieken, 'The organisation of the soul: Elias and Foucault on discipline and the self', op. cit., pp. 353-71; 'Social discipline and state formation: Weber and Oestreich on the historical sociology of subjectivity', Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, vol. 17 (1989), pp. 3-28.

263. in C. Wouters, ''Ja, ja, ik was nog niet zoo'n beroerde kerel, die zoo'n vriend had' (Nescio)', op. cit., p. 10.

264. N. Elias, 'Wir sind die späten Barbaren: Der Sociologe Norbert Elias über die Zivilisationsprozeß und die Triebbewältigung', Der Spiegel, vol 42(21), 1988, p. 190.

265. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press (1993).

266. A. Gouldner, 'Doubts about the uselessness of men and the meaning of the civilizing process', Theory & Society, vol. 10 (1981), p. 418.